


Impulse Variability

by NoHolds



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Coming Out, F/F, Friends to Lovers, Malydia, POV Multiple, Slow Burn, Who let me write this, canon compliant to end of 6a, ghost riders, i dont. fucking know what to tag this., longfic, my creative writing profs would be so disappointed in me, werewolf shenanigans
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-12
Updated: 2018-11-08
Packaged: 2019-06-26 05:44:20
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 9
Words: 25,860
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15656937
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/NoHolds/pseuds/NoHolds
Summary: Her mother had asked, once, in the thick of the Peter madness that swept Lydia permanently just-off of sanity, “where do you go all day?” And Lydia had said,“Driving. I like to listen to the radio. Top 40s, you know?”Her mother had nodded. “I don't get pop music,” she’d said.When your ditzy popular girl act is so convincing your own mother buys it, does it stop being an act?Lydia wonders, sometimes, how much of her is real anymore. If you put her in the ground, how much would even rot? How much would just stay, like all the millions of plastic bottles all packed in cubes way underground? How much is even flesh and bone?Or, "Lydia and Malia fall in love, mostly by accident, and it's all very complicated"





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> If you're die-hard Stydia probably don't read this? I quite like Stiles but him & Lydia Super Do Not End Up Together in this fic. Juust a heads up.  
> Uh also i haven't watched the last 1/2 season. So. this may not be totally canon compliant.

Stiles comes back from the station in a cloud of smoke and sulfur-- properly Biblical stuff, he thinks,  _ very _ dramatic- and then his feet hit the pavement and his knees fold up like accordions, all those complex bones and tendons and muscles going awry all at once, the lazy jerks.

Stiles goes palm-down on the sidewalk and pukes his guts up. There is still the sound of horse in his ears, tack and hoof. (he remembers that running gag with Umbridge, in the Harry Potter movies, where the centaurs scared her so bad she freaked at hoofbeats forever, and Stiles's brain follows that thread for a moment, so the first thing he says to his best friends, after being pulled back into reality, is

"Man I hope I don't get like, horse trauma after this."

His voice is (ha ha) all hoarse from the puking. His face is a mess of snot and tears. Stiles looks up, slowly, from the sets sneakers all arranged around him, to the concerned faces peering down.

"Stiles?" Scott says. Not like he will, sometimes, when he isn't sure what Stiles is talking about but like.

Like a question. Like, " _ are _ you Stiles?"

"Hi," Stiles says. Tries to straighten up and just ends up on his haunches-- further away from the puke, at least.

The streets are rain-wet, all silver with it, and between that and the smoke still boiling away from wherever they pulled Stiles out of, it feels very properly horror movie.

But it's hard to feel too scared, with the pack all there around him. Their tired, dirty faces, the smile breaking across Scott's whole fucking body, and--  _ Lydia _ .

Lydia, who drops Malia's hand to step forward and help him up. Lydia who he lists into when she gets him standing.

She smells nice. She always smells nice, like perfume or something. Like girls smell.

And her cheek is all torn bloody and her hair's in tangles but her shoulder is strong, when she drapes his arm across it.

"Scott," Lydia says, "help me with him?"

And then Scott's taking Stiles's other arm, and Stiles barely has time to feel the warm fuzzies before he's passing out again.

* * *

He will remember, later, Lydia  _ dropping _ Malia's hand.

Which meant she had been  _ holding _ Malia's hand.

Which meant: ??

Mark that one red, for now.

* * *

Later, when Lydia saves him from the gun pressed up to his forehead in the locker room (deja vu, by the way, and  _ so _ not the good kind), she will say-- 

She will say "I didn't say it back," her throat all raw from banshee scream.

"You didn't have to," Stiles says. Means it. He knows she loves him-- doesn't know when he realized it, only now it feels like something he's known forever, something fundamental. Right there in the marrow of him, producing blood cells and shit. Which-- okay, this metaphor’s gotten away from him, maybe, but the point is Lydia loves him. And she kisses him there, in the locker room, and this time Stiles isn't shocked and fish-lipped under her, and it feels  _ good _ , and they love each other, and so that's how these things work out, isn't it?

Everything according to plan.

* * *

"I'm not saying it," Malia says. Peter is sitting on a train-station bench in front of her, reading the paper all peaceful. It's alien, really, seeing him do something so.... benign.

"Malia," Lydia says. Toes a book out of the way to step forward, put a hand on Malia's shoulder.

"I'm not!" Malia turns, this coyote-blue gleam waydeep down in her eyes. All around them, people sit and stare into middle distance and wait, as if Beacon Hills isn't collapsing in all around them.

This past month Lydia's felt like that, a little. Like she's been--  _ waiting _ for something, without quite knowing what. Waiting while the crucial infrastructure of her life all falls apart.

Stiles, she's sure. It  _ has _ to be him. He loves her. And she loves him back-- of course she does. Memory or no memory. He must be what's missing. What she's waiting for. 

"Malia," Lydia says, and the library/train-station shimmers all around them, the unreality of it. 

Except-- she's real, isn't she?

And Malia is real. Her shoulder is warm under Lydia's hand, all her rangy coyote muscle, and she frowns at Lydia, brow creasing up the way it will when she's not quite sure how to be human. Her jaw tightens. And she puts her hand over Lydia's, for just a moment. Turns around.

"Dad." She says. Unconvincing.

"Like you mean it."

Malia turns back, again, and bares her teeth at Lydia, but Lydia knows when to be afraid of her, and this isn't one of those times. She bares her teeth back (it feels very silly, without those pointed canines). Malia rolls her eyes, and Lydia nods at Peter, unnatural calm on his bench.

Malia sighs. Squares her shoulders, like she's facing up to a fight, and Lydia sees the tension in her forearms, sees where claws threaten at her fingertips.

"Dad?" Malia's voice wobbles, in the middle, and Lydia's chest wrings out like an old washcloth. 

But she has no time for the weird, tender feeling rising up in her, because Peter blinks, and stirs, and Malia says," _ Dad _ ?"

And Peter stands up and says, "Malia?" Incredulous, and then there is work, to be done.

* * *

But anyway the point is that they're friends, right, and friends feel things for each other. Right? They feel  _ for _ each other.

Lydia remembers, before Alison had--

Well.

Lydia remembers Alison's little bedroom, her perfect white-washed windows and her charmingly out-of-date wallpaper. Remembers one day, in particular:

Lydia's sitting criss-cross-applesauce against Allison's headboard, absently tracing her fingers over the white-on-whiter pattern of the bedspread. Florals, she thinks. Can't identify the specifics.

She's trying her level best not to burst into the bathroom, where Allison has been barricaded for too long.

"Let me freshen up," she'd said, like a woman in an old movie. Lydia can picture the smell of perfume, heady, see the pearls tight around her throat.

She's always been good at that. At picturing people as they might be, might look-- it’s a type of problem solving. So: Allison, 'freshening up' in some smokey old restaurant. Not Allison, breaking down over the death of her mother.

It's as easy as that.

The bathroom door creaks open-- Lydia turns like her head's on a pull string. Like she'll always turn to look, for Allison, until one day--

Well. Until one day she won't.

Alison's red around the eyes, but she's put concealer over the blotchy way her cheeks get when she cries. Lydia can see a little swipe of slightly-darker peach where Allison hasn't blended, properly.

She thinks about the bedspread, white-on-white, a pattern she can't quite make out, and something goes funny in her stomach.

She holds out her hand, and Alison staggers across the space between them--  _ staggers _ . The bed dents under her weight, and Allison's face dents, too. Crumples up in the effort not to keep crying.

"Oh," Lydia says, soft, and reaches out slow as anything. Allison lets her. Leans into Lydia's hand, even, when Lydia blends the foundation in, with her fingertips.

" _ Lydia _ ," she says, voice all watery "It's just--"

"I know," Lydia says. Alison collapses forward against her chest.  _ Collapses _ , and later Lydia will find black marks on her blouse, from Allison's mascara gone wet and runny on her shoulder.

"It's  _ fucked _ ," Allison says.

There's not much to say, to that.

It is. It's fucked.

So Lydia just brings her arm up, and hugs Allison across her shoulders, tight as she can.

* * *

_ That's _ what she feels, looking at Malia saying the word "Dad" like it's hurting her, like the concept's scarier even than her mother, filicidal literal-monster that she is.

This weird, tender, mushy feeling, like all the vital insides Lydia knows the precise names for have stopped working like they should. Like her heart has impossibly skipped a beat, like her stomach has an impossible knot all tied up in it.

* * *

Her friends are in danger. It's how she  _ should _ feel.

Lydia's had reasons enough to feel crazy, in her life, but surely this isn't one.

And this is what teenage friendships are  _ like _ , she’s seen movies. She has braided hair and told secrets and this is what it is  _ supposed  _ to be like. She feels how she is  _ supposed _ to feel.

Surely, surely.

* * *

And, anyway, it all works out, doesn't it? They save everyone, for once. Lydia is not left-behind-forgotten in a ghost town. No one dies. Not even the  _ bad _ guy dies, and so they're getting better at this, apparently.

And that's good news. 

Kind of unequivocally.

* * *

"Can I take you out for coffee?" Stiles says, his backpack hanging off one shoulder.

Lydia startles.

She never used to startle-- could always kind of tell when Stiles was around, but maybe un-forgetting someone isn't the same as not having forgotten them in the first place.

She closes her locker, turns. The school's last-day empty, deserted, and she has this horrible vision of it empty when the riders came through,  of the lights all hanging down from the ceiling, the creeping feeling they'd failed, and she's the last one left after all, until Malia comes out of the library and prods Lydia in the back and goes, "what are you  _ looking _ at?" And the fear goes down like cough syrup. Leaves a bad taste in her mouth, but here, here's Malia helping her choke it down all the same.

"Lydia?" Stiles says, and Lydia snaps her eyes to him. Realizes she's been staring into the hallway, vacant, and she smiles as bright as she knows how (which is fucking thousand-watt, by the way).

"Yes?" She says.

"Is there-- I mean are you having like. A moment." 

When he says 'a moment' he wiggles his fingers at her, like there should be spooky music alongside, and it makes Lydia laugh.

"No," she says. "Sorry. I was just thinking."

Stiles bobs his head. Tugs his backpack on all the way. "Great. No corpse to retrieve. Good news." He's gripping the straps, white-knuckled, & it makes his elbows stick out.  _ Akimbo _ , Lydia thinks. It was a word on her vocabulary list in grade 6, but she never  _ really _ knew what it meant until she got to know Stiles. 

"So." He says.

Lydia gives him an expectant look.

"Coffee?" Stiles clears his throat. "Uh, us. Can we get coffee-- can I get a coffee, uh, for you?"

"Oh," Lydia says, and there is this weird, queasy flip in her gut. She smiles. "Sure. Saturday?"

Stiles blinks. "Uh, yeah. Yes! I can definitely-- do Saturday."

He's smiling. He has this awkward smile that makes Lydia smile, too, reflex, and she remembers kissing him and she thinks-- well,  _ of course _ .

* * *

 

Impulse variability is when a person means to do one thing- in fact, believes that they are doing one thing- and end up doing another.

It's the cause of car crashes, sometimes. People hit the accelerator, and think they're hitting the brake, and so they go when they mean to stop. Panicking, they will press harder on what they believe to be the brake, and accelerate even faster, until-- well. They stop accelerating.

It's not negligence. These people really think- are really convinced- that their foot is on the brake, not the throttle.

Lydia Martin had never once in her life done something without meaning to, and then Peter used her to haul himself up from the grave, and everything went so  _ fucking _ sideways she almost didn’t notice at first. Like something can go so completely wrong it nearly reaches ‘round to normal, again. 

Lydia would go to bed and wake up the woods. She would think she was driving straight and end up making turns, circling the block till she ran out of gas.

Ever since, there's been this nagging-- well. She _ knows _ it doesn't make any sense. But ever since Peter, Lydia's had this nagging feeling like she's just being pulled along on a string.

Since before Peter, maybe, actually. 

She is a pretty girl. She dates a handsome Lacrosse player. She excels in school but she isn't cocky about it. She applies to and gets into a prestigious college. And life's easy like that, isn't it? Like, lay out the track, and there she goes along it. Lydia Marten, the world's most complicated wind-up toy.

Stiles has always felt a little like that.

Inevitable.

Like no matter how things went, there they would be, together, at the end of it.

* * *

But, back when Stiles was gone, there is this:

Lydia sees the flash of Malia's long, long legs disappear around a corner, barely covered by some alarming bad-idea of an outfit. (Lydia admires that, and not in a passive aggressive, housewife-stereotype way. How she just wears whatever).

Lydia follows-- Malia's been unstable lately and Lydia wouldn't  _ tell _ her this, of course, for knowledge of the bared teeth that would be her answer, but she's--

Well. She's worried.

She follows Malia down through the school, the halls bright-fluorescent, mismatched linoleum and that nagging sense of missing something.

They end up in the boiler room which-- like, okay, Lydia's  _ watched _ Buffy, she  _ knows _ what happens to people who end up in the boiler room.

But instead, there is Malia with one arm chained to a pipe, and she is holding the loose end of a second chain in the other hand.

"Someone used to do this for me," she says, and rattles the chained hand, and she looks at Lydia with just this complete, this  _ absolute _ helplessness. 

Lydia unsticks from where she's been hanging in the doorway. Crosses the room halfway and Malia  _ growls _ , and then her face crumples entirely.

" _ Fuck _ ," she says. "Sorry. I don't--"

Lydia waits for Malia's teeth to pull back into their gums.

"It's okay," she says. Takes another step, and when that seems OK, she closes the distance between them.

"Here," she says, and reaches out her hand. Malia gives her the loose end of the chain.

"No-- Malia." 

Malia tugs her chained hand as close to her chest as she can. Her eyes are huge-- are enormous, they are impossible not to see. They are welling up, wet, with tears.  _ Such a pretty colour _ , Lydia thinks. Thanks god Malia doesn’t wear makeup, because with mascara Lydia wouldn’t-  _ no one _ would- be able to look away from those eyes of hers.

"You can't," Malia says, and yanks at the chain. Lydia startles out of her tangent. "You  _ can't _ . I don't want to--"

"You won't." Lydia means to reach for the chain but she sort of gets Malia's hand, instead, ends up with her fingers over Malia's fingers over Malia's heart, the manacle pressing up cold against her skin. "Malia, you won't hurt anyone."

And Malia takes this deep breath, shaky, and she says, "I was _ going  _ to say you."

Lydia frowns.

"I don't want to hurt  _ you _ ."

And-- well, what is there to do, with that? Lydia slams shut the door that opens up in her, stems whatever soppiness might've come leaking out.

“You won’t,” Lydia says. “Let me undo this.”

Malia looks at her a long time-- takes a deep breath, and the tension goes out of her forearm. Lydia  _ feels _ it, the unflexing of muscle. Malia lets Lydia coax her hand away from her chest. Lets her unlock the manacle. 

And then her legs kind of fold up under her, and Lydia goes down with her, so they’re both crouching there, on the cold and gritty concrete, some basement-dampness soaking through the knees of Lydia’s leggings. 

Malia’s hand is still in Lydia’s, and her wrist is all ringed in blood, a bracelet carved in by the manacle. 

“I  _ hate _ this,” Malia says. Her voice has the edge, just the very edge, of a growl, and Lydia’s legs are bracketing hers, and Malia’s head is hanging forward, hair tickling Lydia’s collarbones, and it is all--

It’s very strange. 

They never used to hang out, Lydia thinks. Just the two of them. She knows there was someone else, but when she tries to grab that thought it skates out of reach. It’s-- h mm. she’s not really used to not knowing things, to be honest. Or, rather, not really used to not being able to find something out, when she needs to. 

“Me too,” she says to Malia. The concrete is digging divots into Lydia’s one hand, where she’s leaning on it, and it makes clear to her only how  _ warm _ Malia’s skin is, in comparison. 


	2. Chapter 2

There is a knock at Lydia’s door, just after finals have ended. She’s having a movie night with her mother; Pitch Perfect, and Lydia is maybe a little wine-tipsy, and her mom keeps sighing over Anna Kendrick and saying,  _ some women have all the luck! How is she allowed to be beautiful  _ and _ have a voice like that _ ? 

And Lydia agrees. She imagines she finds Anna Kendrick beautiful in just the same way her mother does.  Objective.

Lydia’s always been very  _ good _ at objective.

It is the low point at the end of act two, some sad slow song playing over a montage of people being lonely, and Lydia is reaching for her wine glass when there is that knock, at her front door. 

“I’ll get it,” Lydia says, and her mom says, 

“Mhm.”

Lydia looks through the peephole, first. It’s been a quiet few months, but she’s been feeling unsettled, in this vague sort of way, and so maybe, instinctively, she knows that trouble is on its way.

It turns out, trouble is. Though not quite the trouble Lydia was imagining. Not banshee-instincts trouble.

Instead, Malia is there on her doorstep, a tote bag clutched to her chest. Her eyes are fluorescent blue. 

Lydia opens the door. “Malia?”

“The full moon,” Malia says. The sun is starting to set behind her; one of those slow, late, summer sunsets, turning the shadows long. “I forgot about it.” She shuffles from foot to foot. “Well? Can I come in?”

Lydia glances over her shoulder. Her mother is pouring another glass of wine, not paying them the slightest attention.

“I’m going upstairs, alright?” Lydia calls, and her mom says, again,

“Mhm.”

Malia squirms.

“ _ Upstairs _ ?” She says. “Don’t you have a basement?”

Lydia blinks. “No. What house has a basement, in California?”

“Stiles does.”

The night is fast approaching. Lydia looks up at the sky, bruised purple, and shakes her head. “Well, I don’t. So you can come upstairs, or you can go get Stiles.” She thinks she sees the impression of the moon, low on the horizon. “I could give you a ride, if you promise not to rip up the backseat.”

“Upstairs it is,” Malia says, and pushes past Lydia. Her feet are loud, on the stairs, and Lydia finds herself smiling, as she re-locks the door, without quite meaning to. 

No promises about the back seat, then. 

* * *

“Which one is your bedroom?”

"Oh no--" Lydia says. "Guest bedroom. I'm not explaining claw marks in my sheets."

Malia shrugs-- she's moving like stop motion with the middle frames yanked out, jerky and too-fast. All agitation. "Whatever," she says, and does sort of an abortive spin in the hallway. "Then which one is the  _ guest _ bedroom?"

Lydia grabs her by the hand and yanks her to the end of the hall-- the bedroom door, once opened, lets out this waft of dust-smell, and Lydia can't  _ think _ the last time they used this room, but now here she is, werecoyote in tow, so. That's life for you.

Malia wrinkles her nose up, and she says, "smells like the library," in nowhere near the fond way most people talk about library-smell.

The blue's gone out of her eyes, though, mostly, left behind that dark-and-deep brown Lydia likes so much. That's progress. Forward motion. Lydia tugs her inside, shuts the door behind them, and that makes Malia's hand tighten around Lydia's, nearly painful, knuckles bunching up against each other.

"Okay?" Lydia says.

"Mm," says Malia, but there's nearly a growl to it, and Lydia looks back at the door. Oh. She's cut off Malia's exits. If Lydia was a coyote-- Hell, even if she was just  _ Lydia _ , in an unfamiliar house, she'd like to have an escape route, just in case.

"Door stays closed," she tells Malia. "But I can open the window."

Malia takes a breath deep through her nose. Nods her head towards the window. “Fine.”

"Malia." 

" _ What _ ?"

"My hand?"

Malia looks down, at where she has a vice-grip on Lydia. Looks back up with that familiar frown-line between her eyebrows, and slowly-  _ slowly- _ lets go.

Lydia flexes the stiffness out of her hand. Opens the window.

There's this strange, not-nerves feeling in her chest, some cousin of fear, and Lydia would blame it on banshee stuff but she really feels more-or-less in control.

Malia sits carefully on the edge of the bed. Her hands are knotted on her knees, fingertips curled under like Lydia's familiar with, by now. Hiding her claws. 

Lydia sits, gingerly, next to her. Reaches over and starts to uncurl Malia's fingers-- weird how normal this has started to seem. Malia's been touchy since she stopped being feral, but Lydia never really has been. Not with most people, anyway. 

Malia bares those needle-sharp teeth, but her hand relaxes. Her claws are bloody, nearly to the nail bed, and Lydia tries to tug her hand palm-up but it's like trying to flip a car, for as much as Malia allows herself to be budged.  She has her head turned away, and in profile Lydia can see this long line of tension, from the clamped square of her jaw and down the tendons of her neck, this long muscle standing out. (the  _ Sternocleidomastoid _ , thinks the scaly part of Lydia's brain that has never once forgotten anything it's learned).

"Okay," she says. "So. What happens next?"

Malia's hand tries to re-curl, and Lydia squeezes, gentle-- no grip Malia couldn't break, if she tried even a little bit. She's not looking at Malia's face, anymore, her neck, but their hands, linked up on Malia's thigh, and Malia's blood this surprise of colour in the beige room, wet-red where it's smeared up over Lydia's knuckle.

"I don't know," Malia says. "We wait?"

Lydia looks back up at her; the deep, concentrated frown-line between her eyebrows, the bead of blood welling up where she's gnawing on her lip.

Red's a good colour on her, Lydia thinks, and,  _ God _ , and then decidedly stops looking at Malia's mouth.

"If we do that," she says, staring down away from their hands, down at the tasteful cream of the EZ-Vacuum carpet where it dents around her feet, "what are the odds of you ripping apart my guest room?"

Lydia hears Malia's deep breath. "Pretty good," she says, strangled. Lydia doesn't have to look out the window to know that night's stolen onto them properly, now. That the moon's bright-round-silver in the sky, overhead. The street lights come on, one-by-one, an eerie click-click-click down the street. 

Lydia can  _ feel _ the coyote bunching up under Malia’s skin, all this restless energy with nowhere to go, but she’s not Banshee-nervous. She’s not even regular-nervous, really, and if she trusts  _ anything _ , it’s her fucking instincts. 

Malia's leg bounces up and down so hard her heel manages to make a noise, slamming against the floor, even through the carpet.  _ Restless _ , Lydia thinks, again, and then this thought comes up in her like lightning, and she drops Malia's hand.

"You always tear up the place?" She says, and Malia nods, all her muscles tensed, her mouth clamped shut, fur bristling out past her hairline, coyote-silver. And Lydia says, "then get out of my house."

Malia swivels to look at Lydia, her eyes flaring up blue, and she says, " _ what? _ " Through a mouthful of teeth, grisly.

"I’m leaving too," Lydia says. "Chase me. Come on."

Malia's breath comes up in her chest, harsh, and Lydia recognizes an unsuccessful attempt at square breathing when she hears it.

"I'll," Malia grits out, " _ kill _ you."

"No,” Lydia says, and stands. "You won't. Wait here until you hear a horn, okay?"

Malia growls. Her fingers come unlinked from Lydia’s, and then she’s clutching the bedsheet with both hands, knotted up on either side of her thigh. 

“Okay?”

Malia nods, tension through her like a piano-wire. The photographic memory part of Lydia looks at Malia’s hands, all bunched up in the bedsheets. The muscles of her forearms standing out firm. The photographic part of Lydia goes,  _ hmm, _ and files the image away for later. She takes Malia's bag, and leaves her there in the guest room, with the dust and the soothing beige walls. 

Lydia slips out the front door-- doesn't stop to put on a jacket, just jams her feet into flip-flops and revels in that crystal-clear feeling, when she's got a plan and knows just how it'll unfold, when everything lines up in front of her and she thinks,  _ oh, of course _ , the whole world opening up for her to see.

Her mother does not even look up from the couch. 

Lydia hops into her car, starts it up, and lays on the horn.

A moment-- a  _ moment _ , later, there is the sound of clattering slate, and shingles tumble down from the roof as Malia, coyote-shaped, launches herself from the window to the roof to the road, her mouth open and panting, white teeth bared and red tongue lolling. 

Lydia steps on the gas.

* * *

Saturday is--

Nice. 

Stiles picks Lydia up in the Jeep and he’s in a button-up, nice jeans, like-- he still looks like  _ Stiles _ , too-big clothes and a nervy smile, but he’s really-- he’s trying.

Lydia dresses up, too, but when doesn’t she?

The jeep’s cab is thick with this cologne Stiles must be wearing. It’s strong, but it’s not unpleasant. Nothing about their date is unpleasant. Stiles talks a mile a minute for the first little while, doesn’t even touch his drink, until Lydia puts her hand on his elbow and says,

“Stiles. Breathe.”

He does. Shuddery,  _ loud _ , like he actually  _ hasn’t _ taken a breath since he sat down.

It’s a nice cafe. Outside of their usual stomping grounds. 

_ Something different _ , Stiles had said, like he knew, somehow, how  _ restless _ Lydia has been. How she’s been craving a change. The cafe’s little AC unit churns and sputters-- the day is hot outside, thick California summer, and the both of them are sweating, a little. 

Lydia can feel it sticking her hair to the back of her neck, to her forehead, beading up under her makeup, and she looks at Stiles-- who is trying to take a drink, but the lid is turned sideways, and so he’s just got his lip fixed on unbroken plastic. Trying to drink without an opening. And he’d notice, except he’s looking at her, at  _ Lydia _ , like there’s no one else in the whole world, for all her sweat and sticky hair. 

It’s something in his eyes. A-- a  _ reverence _ , that makes Lydia’s insides feel as sticky as her skin. Queasy sort of. She doesn’t hate herself-- she never has, but he gets that  _ look _ on his face, and she thinks,  _ God, why me _ ?

It’s a lot to hold on to, the way he looks at her. Like she fills up his whole fucking  _ world _ .

“Stiles,” Lydia says. “You’re-- drinking from the wrong side.”

He looks down. “Oh! I mean, I know.”

She laughs. 

He puts down the cup. “I u-h- don’t really like tea anyway.”

“I know,” Lydia says. She does. She knows everything about him, it feels like-- Stiles and the rest of the pack, they’re all she sees, most days. She’s not Stiles-level worried about leaving it behind, but that sort of friendship, of family--

It’s a lot to think about losing. 

“But uh, you know-- coffee gives you bad breath. So.” He’s not looking at her, his hands chafing the tops of his thighs. Nervous tick. Stiles has about twenty nervous ticks Lydia’s seen, and she’s sure some more on the side. 

“Right,” She says, and remembers how to flirt. Like Banshee-intuition, this instinct that says,  _ do this, and here’s what will happen _ . The if/then statement of her social life. She leans an elbow forward on the table. Says, “Well, you’ve always been good at planning ahead.”

Stiles licks his lips- another nervous tick, make that 21- and laughs. “Yep. That’s me, the uh. Plan guy.”

“Mhm.” Lydia smiles. “It’s good to have you back. We missed you-- you should have seen the schemes we came up with, when you were gone. Couldn't hold a candle.”

Stiles smiles, all soppy, and that’s hard to look at, too. That’s a lot to manage. “I missed you too. Uh-- I mean, all of you, but also. You.”

Lydia folds one leg over the other, so her foot brushes Stiles’s calf, and she takes a sip of her coffee.

She’s not worried about bad breath. She brought mints. She’s a planner, too.

* * *

And they do end up kissing, and it’s nice, and Stiles drives her home and drops her off at her place, and when he’s at the end of the driveway he turns around. “This is weird,” he says, and Lydia’s gut drops through the topsoil, right down to where nothing grows. 

“It is?’ She says. (It is. It is colossally weird, it’s fucking Ripley’s Believe It Or Not, it’s sideshow weird,  _ here, look, leer, _ but she’d thought  _ he  _ didn’t think so, that  _ he _ thought it was all normal, and maybe she’s not hiding it as well as she thought. That this isn’t working out the way it should, that she wants to like him-- that she  _ does, _ that she  _ loves  _ him, but when he looks at her the way he looks at her she just feels--)

“Yeah,” Stile says. “We already know each other so well, right? I mean, I can do the first date thing if you want, of course! I love the-- um. First date thing. but it seems a little, uh,  redundant, doesn’t it?”

Oh. 

Oh,  _ that  _ kind of weird. “You can come in,” Lydia says. “If you want.”

Stiles’s eyes almost bug out of his head. 

“ _ Just-- _ for a movie.”

“I could do a movie,” he says, and comes back up the walk. 

She snags his hand, on the way past, and he bends in towards her with just the slightest pressure. He’s a good kisser, really-- lips a little dry, chapped, but it’s nice, kissing Stiles. Comfortable. His hand is warm, when it comes up to cup the back of her neck.

* * *

Stiles falls asleep on the opposite end of the couch from her, knees tented up over Lydia’s legs. Maybe he should have ordered that coffee, after all. Some forgettable action movie is playing on the TV, the billionth super-hero movie they’d both missed in theatres, and Lydia looks down at him, all slack in sleep. 

His socks are mismatched-- all the effort to dress nice, and he’d not bothered with matching socks. Relaxed like this, Stiles looks as young as he is. As they all are, still soft around the eyes and mouth. Lydia lays her arms, carefully, overtop of his knees. 

Fondness nearly overwhelms her. Rises up in her, tidal, and she looks down at Stiles’s slack mouth, his shirt tucked in a little twisted, and it swamps her.

It could be this easy, all the time. None of the pressure, the side-show feeling, just them on a couch, and wouldn’t that be  _ nice _ . There’s a reason things felt so strange, when he was forgotten. Stiles is this part of her life vital as a kidney; he’s unglamorous, maybe, but  _ God _ she needs him. 

Stiles gives this sleepy, ticklish horse-twitch and Lydia lifts her arms back away. Doesn’t want to wake him. Disturb this thing between them, that gets more and more fragile the closer they get. 

It feels inevitable.  _ Something _ does. She can’t even articulate  _ what _ anymore, just feels something barrelling towards her, 90 down the highway, and here she is. Stock-still. Watching it come.

* * *

Did you know hitting a deer at speed can get  _ you _ killed? Not just the deer but the driver?

When Lydia was 6, and her parents were still together, her mom took out a deer by the legs, and it bashed in the front windshield of their little VW bug. 

The buck’s antler came an inch away from making Lydia’s dad a single parent. Got her mom in the throat but missed anything vital-  _ A miracle _ , the EMT said, like there was such a thing in Beacon Hills.  Lydia still has a scar at her hairline where she bashed her head against the seat in front of her.

“ _ Fucking thing! _ ” her dad had said, but Lydia sort of gets it. It isn’t  _ her _ style, really, but she gets trying to take them out with you, if you have to go. 

If it was her, though, she thinks she’d just be a bump under the wheels. Leaping _ into _ the windshield feels very loud. Lydia’s always fell apart so quiet no one even noticed. She’s very good at it, actually.

* * *

On the night of the full moon, Lydia takes them out of town. Down side-streets and off-roads without much traffic, places no one’d see her speeding with a coyote keeping pace behind.

Like, it’s Beacon Hills, right, but at least  _ try  _ to hide the freaky stuff. 

Malia starts to lag behind when the road’s turned to gravel, out in the boonies, and Lydia slows down. 

It’s a cool night, cotton-swab clouds racked up behind the dark of the pines, that blue-cheese moon hanging low in the sky. The sort of pretty night you can never take a good picture of-- just comes out black with a white dot for the moon. 

Lydia eases her foot off the gas, just rolls down the road. It’s so quiet she can hear Malia’s footsteps, the crunch-crunch rhythm of her paws on the gravel.

They come to a stop where the road narrows and lifts up into the hills that become the mountains, if you go far enough along. Lydia rolls down the window. “You going to try and eat me?” she says.

Malia, still coyote, flops to a seat, and her mouth hangs all the way open. Her breath fogs out into the night. Her sides heave, ribs pressing out against the fur. 

Lydia takes a deep breath, too. That dusty smell, when a rain’s coming overdue. The green of the redwoods, miles off. She wonders what Malia can smell, half-animal even at the best times, and looks back down. 

Malia looks up at her, eyes gleaming full-moon bright, the white of her fur red with road-dust. 

When she catches her breath, Lydia rolls up the window, and she keeps driving. Feeling, even now, just that little bit out of control.

* * *

“Do you  _ not  _ indicate your turns?” Lydia says, and Stiles looks over at her, sitting in the passenger seat. 

“What?”

“The last turn. You didn’t indicate.” She feels immediately like a Grandma, saying it, like, oh, she's a backseat driver now, too? But Stiles just smiles.

“Oh! Yeah, if you indicate left-side turns, the signal gets stuck.” Stiles pats the steering wheel, fondly, and a bit of old leather falls off into his lap. “There’s no one else out here, anyway.”

He’s right-- There isn’t. It's just the two of them, driving through the morning of Beacon Hills, early enough the fog’s not burned off. Stile’s phone is propped on the glovebox, and they’ve been listening to podcasts mostly in silence. Something weird and sci-fi masquerading as meditation tapes, found-footage, and Lydia catches Stiles breathing in rhythm when the narrator tells you to. 

It makes her heart  _ hurt _ , in some strange way- not bad but sore, this person in her life who she loves, who’s been coaxed through so many panic attacks he listens, automatically, when someone tells him,  _ now breathe in through your nose _ . 

It’s funny. Stiles usually isn’t a morning person, but he’d texted her, and he’d gone, _Kira_ _recommended me a podcast-- before, and do you wanna hang out and listen to it?_ She didn’t ask why he was up so early. Just says, “Hey, how are you?” When they meet, and makes eye contact. So he knows she means it. _H_ _ow are you_?

He says ‘alright’. And they all are. They’re alright. They’re getting there, anyway.

“You’re right, though.” Stiles says, a few blocks later. 

“Hmm?”

“The turn signal. I should get it fixed.”

“ _ Really _ ?” Lydia can’t help but saying.  _ Get it fixed _ . Not ‘stick some duct tape on it and call it a day.’  _ Get it  _ fixed. 

“I’m-” he says. “Thinking of giving it to Scott, so.”

And Lydia looks at him, and then can’t watch the complicated places his expression is going-- God he’s easy to read, to her. Just wide-open, all the time. Lydia turns away. Watches the fog drape itself over the street, the halo it makes around the street-lamps.

_ Forgiveness is important, _ the podcast tells them.  _ Breathe in, and out. _

Lydia and Stiles breathe, in perfect time.

* * *

Anyway. Lydia finishes listening to the first season with Stiles, and then she goes home and devours the second season on her own. It’s a bit weird for her taste, really. She’s more of a non-fiction podcast person. But it turns out that a story about a woman trapped in a strange facility, and subject to stranger experiments, strikes a bit of a chord with her.

_ Go  _ figure . 

(it is also _-_ _maybe-_ that the podcast is about two women, and they are in love, and they maybe never get together, but they  are in love and it’s) (Well, it is what it is. No need to read into it).

Anyway. The second season turns out to be about an art museum. Not a lot of content out there for her ‘former prisoner at a shady hospital and current fretter about the state of basically every relationship’ niche.

The museum stuff is-- ok. Lydia doesn’t think she’ll listen to the third season.

* * *

When the dawn finally breaks, it’s near on six in the morning, and Lydia is gummy-tired, her eyes and mouth all dry, her ankle cramped from pressing on the gas so long. She pulls over right there, right where she is, on the shoulder of some gravel road in even-more-the-middle-of-nowhere then they usually are, in Beacon Hills.

The low sun draws all the shadows out, long, and between them is this thick golden light, like syrup, like the sun’s warmth and light is  _ liquid,  _ is pouring down over them. Lydia puts the car in park. Kills the ignition.

Malia catches up, a moment later, and then is standing in the middle of the road, naked as anything, that sweet-gold light catching in her hair and gilding all the silvery traces of her scars.

“Brought your overnight bag,” Lydia says. "In the trunk." She’s seen Malia naked too many times to be  _ really _ phased by it anymore. 

Malia yawns so huge Lydia sees her molars, and she stalks around to the back of the car. Her hands and feet are dusty to the joints- knees and elbows, respectively, streaked red and gray from the long run, and Lydia wonders if they did something bad, dragging her out of the woods and into their town. If maybe she’d be better off if they’d left her.

The car dips, as the trunk opens, is slammed back shut.

Malia comes around to the passenger side, leggings on, and she’s pulling at her hoodie’s zipper as she walks. Her fingers move stiff and clumsy, and when she opens the door to climb in, Lydia reaches across to zip it up for her.

“Thanks,” Malia says, through another yawn. Her skin is shockingly warm, even through the fabric. Lydia drops her hands away. 

“No problem,” she says. 

Malia cracks her neck. Pushes her seat all the way back, and then she turns and looks at Lydia. “What the fuck,” she complains. 

“What?”

“What was  _ that? _ ”

“You didn’t eat me,” Lydia points out, and takes a moment, as she does sometimes, to take stock of how strange her life has become. How  _ normal _ it feels.  _ You didn’t eat me, so congrats on that, and also, do you wanna stop and grab some breakfast on the way back? I saw a diner on the drive out that looked fantastic _ . 

“ _ Yeah, _ ” Malia says, “But-” and then she yawns, again, and says, “No. I’m too tired to argue. Wake me up when we get back, I’ll yell at you then.”

Lydia feels her mouth crimp up to one side. Can't help it. “Sure,” she says, and just like that, right there, Malia curls sideways on her seat and goes to sleep.

* * *

 

Lydia gets about a mile before the night catches up with her, too, and the car’s warm-- the low angle of the sun sends it straight through the windows, greenhouse, and Lydia’s eyes drift shut exactly once before she pulls over again. She kills the engine. Looks over at Malia, snoring a little, her hair tangled and thick with dust. 

Lydia unclips her seatbelt and then, without really meaning to, pushes a strand of hair back away from Malia’s eyes. Realizes what she’s doing and shakes it off, reclines her seat, and lies back to take a nap. 

She thinks,  _ there’s no way I’m falling asleep like this, _ the sun streaming through the windshield into her eyes, and the next moment Malia’s got her by the shoulder, and is rattling her awake. 

“Hey,” she says, harsh and loud the way her voice is. Lydia’s stopped taking it like being yelled at-- coyotes don't really do volume control, she supposes. It's not something Malia learned, either.

Lydia stretches and about three of her joints pop at once. “What time is it?” She still feels tired, sort of vague, like the hard edge has been sanded off the world.

“I dunno. I'm starving, though.”

Lydia smiles-- can't help it. “I saw a diner on the drive out,” she says. “Looked fantastic.”

Malia scowls at her. “Why are you smiling like that?” She says.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> can i interest you in four thousand more words of a rarepair fic no one ever asked for?  
> i can interest ME in it. thats for sure.   
> [stiles and lydia are listening, of course, to within the wires]


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Uh! Some unhealthy (consensual, but still unhealthy) sex happens in the first bit of this chapter. It's off-screen [off-page? it's not explicit], but if you're wigged by that kind of stuff, heads up! [if you skip past the third big horizontal line break thing, you should be good]

Anyway so. They-- uh, ‘fuck’ feels like the wrong verb. But Stiles and Lydia. It happens. 

They're sitting in his bedroom, on his unmade bed, and sort of watching The Good Place but mostly just talking. Stiles has his thigh pressed up against hers.

Lydia gets up to go to the bathroom and when she comes back, Stiles grabs her by the hand, tugs her into his orbit. They kiss, once-- chaste, mostly, but when Lydia pulls back Stiles has that  _ look _ in his face, all hushed, reverent, and he says, “I must be the luckiest guy in California.”

Considering how many millionaire celebrities that includes, it's no small claim.

But something quite close to guilt knots up Lydia’s throat. Like swallowing a too-big pill. And so he doesn't see it on her face, whatever it is, she kisses him again, deeper.

After a while, she realizes he's gone hard, under his jeans, and pulls back a little.

“Sorry,” Stiles says, mouth all twisted to one side.

“Don't be.”

Lydia closes the distance between them, again.

Stiles asks if she's sure, if she's okay, if there's something else she wants, about 20 times. He has a condom ready in his bedside table. He makes sure she comes first. It's very-- it's good. He's very... good.

When they're lying back together, after, sweaty and tangled in Stiles’s messy sheets, the ceiling fan overhead circling, circling, the first thing Lydia thinks is,  _ God, he's gonna make some girl so happy someday _ . 

* * *

So. you know. Jesus.

* * *

Lydia showers, before she goes home, and nearly throws up, there in the warm water and the steam, and what the hell is  _ that _ about?

She loves Stiles. She's slept with worse guys.  _ way _ worse! So what the  _ fuck _ ?

* * *

Malia gets one of those breakfasts with like, ‘trucker’s’ or ‘lumberjack’s’ in the name.

Lydia, tired and starving, gets something greasy, bacony, and basically feels herself breaking out from the smell alone, but can't bring herself to care. She goes to the bathroom, to wash off last night’s makeup, and comes back to the table feeling-- still slimy, but a little more human. 

She’s tired, but it’s not a bad sort of tired, really. Like the morning after a great party, worn out and a little smelly but that undercurrent of total content. It's nice, actually. It's really nice.

Malia, who's inhaled half her breakfast in the five seconds Lydia's been gone, squints at Lydia, when she comes back from the bathroom. Takes a huge, deep breath.

“What?” Lydia says.

“I've never seen you without makeup,” she says, and takes another breath. “It's--”

“Are you  _ smelling _ me?”

“I've never smelled  _ just _ you, before,” Malia shrugs, and takes an enormous, messy bite of egg. “It's nice. You smell good.”

Lydia blinks. Sits back down across from Malia. “Thanks?”

Malia shrugs. “No problem,” she says, and then points to Lydia’s plate. “You gonna eat that?”

* * *

When Lydia steps out of the shower, her makeup’s washed off, and Stiles looks up from the bed. Frowns.

“Are you okay?” He says.

Lydia stiffens all along her spine, a vertebrae at a time. “I'm fine,” she says, terrified he'd noticed it, the undefinable  _ thing _ that's been wrong with her. “Why?”

He shrugs. “You just look sorta--” he gestures to his own face. “I dunno. tired.”

* * *

When they were six years old, the both of them, Stiles gave Lydia this homemade valentine. An arts and crafts affair, like you see in cartoons, red cardstock and lace around the border and everything.

But it was shaped like an anatomical heart. Ventricles and all.

“That kid,” her mother had said, that night, the heart laid on in front of them on the cold granite counter. “He's a weirdo.”

Lydia, not knowing any better, had said, “I guess.”

She  _ does _ know better, now. Knows that Stiles definitely  _ is _ a weirdo, but the kind of weirdo she'd take a knife for.

Hell, knows she's a weirdo too, despite her very best efforts. Knows there's a monster just barely under the surface, that if someone pushes too hard at her pretty disguise it will come away like dead skin, will slough from her bones, and there will be something primal and screaming and too-smart under it, some genius death omen.

She knows, too, what really happened that day. Knows Stiles put his messy heart in her hands, and Lydia’s had it ever since, really, and it's sort of a lot to shoulder. The weight of someone's heart, like that.

* * *

So it's  not \-- it's not as simple as telling Stiles, “there's something wrong here, could we just go back to being friends,” because, God, Lydia loves him. All his tics and inconsistencies. 

Like. Stiles is making pizza with her, one day, and he keeps walking from room to room. Go to the cabinet, grab the pan, come back, wait the spices are there too, go to the cabinet, come back with his phone instead because there's something he wants to show her, wait, he forgot the spices-

All the while up to his elbows with bread flour, getting off-white fingerprints on everything, and there's something peppy playing on the radio. The air smells like tomato sauce. Homemade. 

_ We’ll build our home, underwater, _  says the song on the radio, and Stiles hums along.

Lydia looks up from kneading the bread and says, “I do love you, you know.” Doesn’t even mean to. It just spills out of her. Affection too big all to fit in her body, like bread rising. This living, this loving thing inside her, like yeast, expanding 'til it overflows her chest.

Stiles goes sort of watery, around the mouth, and then he smiles like the world’s stopped ending, in Beacon Hills, if only for a minute. 

“I know,” he says.

“Stiles--”

“That wasn’t supposed to be a Star Wars reference!” his hands shoot up in surrender. “Swear to God!”

And he turns around, hands all covered in flour, still, and when he tries to kiss Lydia she ducks and tucks herself into a hug, instead.

She finds flour-handprints on her back, later, stark white on her black sweater, and feels  _ marked. _

It's not like he'd ever,  _ ever _ pressure Lydia if he knew, but it would break his heart. It would pulp it like an old orange, and Lydia’s not so quick to destroy something she's kept such careful watch over, all these years.

She's kind of hoping- well. She has excellent self-discipline and she  _ does _ love Stiles, and she's sort of hoping she can… well.  ‘make herself’ attracted to him is the wrong way to put it. But maybe. Steer herself in that direction. Grow into it. 

It feels like quicksand, it does. The harder she works at this, the longer she waits, the deeper and deeper she gets. Suffocating.

The more damage it'll do to Stiles, if it doesn't work out, anyway. Lydia breathes in against his chest, feels his arms warm around her back, and imagines sand, creeping up over her ears. Can practically taste it, at the back of her tongue.

* * *

“Why did you come to my place?” Lydia says, and Malia looks up with a frown creasing her face in two.

“What?”

“The full moon. Why not Stiles’s?”

“I'm supposed to be studying.” Malia taps her pencil on a summer-school booklet, eraser-down. She always gets graphite all over her hands, when she writes, and already it's smeared up across the heel of her palm.

“You'll pass,” Lydia says. “You know this stuff.”

Malia blinks. “Thanks,” she says. Flat, as ever, but Lydia can see a pleased sort of glimmer in her eye. She never believes she's half as smart as she is, and Lydia’s got this stubborn, defiant urge to prove her wrong, to have something to pick up and push in Malia’s face and go, “here,  _ God, _ you're not even half the failure you think you are.”

Instead, she smiles and says, “So! The full moon?”

Malia groans. The librarian shoots them a dirty look, from across the empty building, the chains on her glasses swinging. 

“I don't know.” She puts down the pencil, shoves hair back out of her eyes. “Stiles is weird now.” A pause. She squints. “Why is your heart beating faster?”

“It's not,” Lydia says, a little queasy, and Malia laughs.

“Oh, you have better ears than me now?”

“Shh!” The librarian says.

“Well,” Lydia says, voice lower, “the librarian definitely does.”

Malia snorts. “You guys are so gross together,” she says. “I'm glad he dumped me.”

Lydia’s heart definitely  _ does _ beat faster now, this fever-feeling in her throat.

“Okay,” Malia says. “What.”

“Nothing!” But-- there's no lying to Malia, really, not when she can probably  _ hear _ Lydia’s gut churn, and Lydia sighs.

“It is,” she says. “Weird, with Stiles. For me too, I mean.”

“Oh.” Malia shrugs. “Cause of the horsemen.”

“Right,” Lydia says, relieved, and Malia looks at her dead in the eye, unflinching, and says, 

“Liar.”

* * *

Lydia really can't-- She  _ really  _ can't hide anything from Malia, and that's scary. That's shit-coming-back-from-the-dead scary, that's alone-on a-full-moon scary.

But it's,

But it's also, like--

There's never been anyone in her life Lydia  _ couldn't  _ hide things from. She's always been too damn good a liar. And so maybe part of it is nearly refreshing. Having someone around who can literally sniff out when Lydia tries to bend the truth a little.

* * *

Lydia finds out that the song Stiles was singing in the kitchen- its home _on_ the water. She would have sworn it was underwater. _Sworn._

* * *

And just like that, a month passes. July ticks over into August and here the future is, stark on the horizon. Not hypothetical, not far away like it had been when the summer had still been getting its legs under it.

_ here I am _ , the future says, and Lydia, with Stiles’s arm draped heavy over her shoulders, stares it down with something approaching dread.

She softens her knees. She gets ready to be a bump, under its wheels.

* * *

And then the next full moon rolls around. They do the same thing, Malia and her. Lydia feels the wind blow past her open windows, that kind of hot, fresh-smelling summer night, and Malia’s pounding after her, and for all the chaos of the town just behind them, they could be the only two people in the world, out here.

Lydia jams her foot down harder on the gas, and the wind dries the sweat on her skin, and Malia  _ howls _ behind her, a wild sound in the calm of the evening. Lydia feels it rise up in her, something electric and reckless under her skin, barreling down the dust road with that horrible, frightful future baring its teeth in the windshield.

Lydia drives. Malia chases. The night, too, howls as they pass it by.

* * *

“You make him really happy,” Scott says, one morning before the pack’s weekly meeting. It's five minutes past when they're supposed to start, and Scott and Lydia the only ones there. Predictable. It was kind of a fool’s errand to book a meeting in the morning, anyway.

But Scott says, “you make him really happy,” and Lydia doesn't have to ask:  _ who? _ And she thinks some base panic, inarticulate, and swallows that down and just says,

“That's good. I want him to be happy.”

Which isn't a lie.

But Scott doesn't smell the lie hiding in it, under the skin of that truth, not like Malia would.

* * *

The morning comes. Like it will. They end up way high in the hills, the mountains startling close, taking up the whole of the sky. The sun, dawning, paints a straight line across them, so you can see, in the golden light, exactly how far the day has come.

Malia flops down onto the gray, drought-dead grass- completely naked, and completely exhausted- and lets out a long, long breath.

Lydia digs the spare clothes out of her trunk, and turns, and suddenly isn't desensitized to it. Malia’s nakedness.

The sun has not quite made it to them, and Malia is all in mountain shadow, the sweet cedar smell in the air, dust all over Malia’s skin. There are pine needles stuck to the bottoms of her feet, and all those miles of golden skin on display, marked off by scars and sun freckles. Lydia's breath leaves her, like a punch to the gut.

It rises up in her again. That wild feeling, and they're not high enough in the hills to be lightheaded but here it is, anyway. Lydia stands in the dirt with her shoes kicked off and sees something barrelling towards her. Headlights shining blinding into her eyes.

She tosses Malia her clothes, and doesn't watch her change, and then Malia’s straightening and looking at Lydia, some dirt smeared over the high line of her cheek.

The thing that has been driving down the road all summer, towards Lydia, is seconds away from contact. Lydia feels it, in the I-can-tell-the-future way she can. She readies her knees, to fold up under its wheels. She means to, she  _ swears _ . 

To go quietly. 

To do as she ought. 

Except--

Then, instead, she reaches out, and rubs the dirt from Malia’s cheek. “Alright?” She says. Her voice sounds a very long way off. The trees seem to loom in towards them, cathedral, and the sunrise, at last, makes its way down into the shadow of the mountains, thick and summer-gold, lighting up Malia’s eyes this bright, wolfy yellow.

Malia takes a deep breath. Catches Lydia’s hand, on its retreat. Her fingers are so  _ warm, _ wrapped around Lydia's wrist. 

Malia leans in.

Lydia's knees do not fold up. She does not go down under the wheels. Instead, she leans into the crash. Instead, she does something loud. Instead, She makes a  _ mess _ .

That is to say, in not so many words: Malia kisses her. Lydia kisses back.

* * *

Because here's what it is, is that Lydia all summer has thought she was falling for Stiles, had thought she was steering herself in his direction. 

And she ends up here, instead, with her hands fisted in the back of Malia’s shirt, with the forest holding its breath for them.

Here she is, with her foot on the throttle, not the brake, and she hadn't even  _ known _ .

* * *

Lydia pulls away gasping,  _ gasping _ , like she is a Jane Austen character (hey, she has the name for it). 

“I’m-” she says, and thinks,  _ Stiles, _ instead of thinking about the swimmy way her head has gone. Instead of thinking about the rubbery feeling in her knees, like the cartilage has all gone to jelly. She’s good at that. At compartmentalizing. 

“Stiles,” she says.

Malia gives her a flat look. “Yeah?”

“You don’t-” Lydia takes a deep breath.  _ Steady _ . Her stomach clamors for attention-- no, her  _ gut _ . Heat and impatient desire there, shouting up to her. “You don’t. Make me feel, like he makes me feel.”

Malia licks her bottom lip, where some of Lydia’s gloss had smudged. She looks unconcerned. Her pupils are huge in her eyes, in those eyes that-- that Lydia has been staring at all summer, Jesus  _ Christ _ , without really realizing. “Maybe _he_ doesn’t make you feel like  _ I _ make you feel.” She says. So matter-of-fact, God bless her, but she can’t be right, because poor fucking  _ Stiles _ , if she is. Because Malia’s some half-coyote girl ( _ girl _ , italicizes the sticky part of Lydia’s brain) from the fucking woods. And girls like Lydia don’t end up with people like that. 

“You don’t know what you’re saying,” Lydia says. 

“Really?” Malia’s voice is just the slightest throaty, and it’s sending a shiver down Lydia’s back. “Because I can  _ smell _ it on you, Lydia.”

And isn't that-- well. Lydia wants to be embarrassed, but here's Malia, who is unembarrassable, who is inches away from Lydia in this beautiful place, the fresh new sun washing over them both.

Lydia does not respond. Does not process. She takes a breath, and leans in for another kiss.

* * *

She has this funny way of walking, Malia does. It's not that she  _ stomps, _ although-- yes, actually, she  _ does _ stomp. Malia was practically  _ made _ to stomp, Lydia thinks, all the small and loud and mean of her. Like the world spat her out and said, _l_ _ ook _ , look at her, isn't she  _ something _ ?

And she is. She’s  _ something _ . Malia is mean, and she stomps when she walks, and she scowls at homework like she can frighten it into being finished, and God, but Lydia loves her.

Loves her like the world folding in on itself, like standing in the Beacon Hills library as it collapses into a train station.

Lydia stands stock-still in the middle of her love, watching it crumple up all the parts of her life together and spit them out and say,  _ here _ , don't you see what you've been missing?

It crystallizes in her, it does. The way her thoughts do, lighting caught in a bottle again and again, when she figures something out. And this, like all her discoveries, it is--

It is undeniable, when it hits her. It lays down in front of her, like a map unrolling, and says,  _ see?  _ And Lydia does.

What  _ choice  _ does she have?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Oh, its the most over-metaphored and out-of-scene of my chapters so far. Excellent.


	4. Chapter 4

She calls Danny.

Well- she texts him first, she's not an _animal_ \- but then she calls him.

It is one of those days so hot and humid it is _sticky_ , and Lydia lays back on her bed. Listens to the air conditioner groan and rattle against the summer that is trying to smother it-- and Lydia alongside.

She lies there a while, scrolls through the feeds of one account and then another without ever reading a word. She’s _not_ thinking about Malia-- she actually isn’t. This isn’t denial, it’s compartmentalization. She’s very good at not thinking about things, when she doesn't want to. Except--

She rolls onto her side. Looks down at her phone, black screen reflecting bright sun onto the ceiling, and abruptly needs to talk to _someone_ , about all this. Feels it welling up inside her chest, feels it like a hand clawing its way up through the soil, yanking itself out of a grave.

But Lydia's never really had the kind of friends she talked to, about her problems.

Well-- Allison, maybe, way back when, but that isn't an option anymore. Obviously.

So she does the next best thing. She phones an expert.

 _You free?_ She texts Danny. _Have sort of a weird question. Not urgent._

A moment later, his little typing bubble pops up, and this relief Lydia didn't know she was waiting for bubbles up in her chest.

_You need me to do some vampire research or something? lol_

Lydia laughs. Well-- she breathes out a little harder through her nose, anyway.

 _Not that sort of weird,_ she says.

The typing bubble appears. Disappears.

 _Do you want to call me instead of texting?_ It eventually says.

So Lydia calls.

“Hey,” Danny says, something sort of soft around the edges, folded-up, like a shirt washed over and over. Lydia thinks, gut-deep, fear-deep, _God, he already knows._

“Hey,” she says, back, “how are you?”

And they small talk, awhile. He likes France. His new school hasn't been torn up by “wild animals” even _once,_ would you believe it?

Then there is a pause. A lull, where they're _both_ waiting for Lydia to say whatever it is that's on her mind.

“So,” she says. “Do you know Malia?”

“Know _of_ her. She's in some of your Insta posts. Uh, were-fox, right?”

“Werecoyote,” Lydia says. “We actually _did_ have a fox, but she's trapped underground for a hundred years, or something.”

Danny’s laughter fuzzes out at the top register of Lydia’s cell. She smiles, reflexive. “Damn,” Danny says. “I was joking about the fox thing. Your life is weird.”

“Yeah,” Lydia says. Then, “Well, that's Beacon Hills, for you.”

“Yeah,” Danny says, after a moment. “I do know Malia, though I think. Kind of, anyway.” He pauses. “She's kinda pretty, isn't she?”

“Yeah,” Lydia says. “She is.” A hole opens in her gut, as she says it, as she lays it out in front of her, unrolls the schematics of all this and it just comes up a mess. “Um,”

And Danny laughs again. Not _at_ her. “It's alright,” he says.

“Okay.” Lydia takes a breath. She makes a list. She formulates a plan. “So you know that Stiles has had a crush on me forever.”

“--yes,” Danny says.

“He asked me out in June. I said yes. I love him. A _lot,_ even.”

There's a pause. Lydia can her the echo of her own breathing, picked up and spat out by the phone’s speakers. “But something's felt-- all summer, with him. I don't know…”

“Off?” Danny suggests.

“Yes!” Lydia switches ears. Sits up. “Yes, like there's some-- like, something I have to be _keeping_ from him, even though--” She sighs. “Anyway. It feels stupid that it took me so long to figure it out, when I say it like that.”

“If there's one thing I know,” Danny says. “It's that you aren't stupid.”

“I know,” Lydia says, and she does. Whatever else might be in doubt, that isn't. “I guess you figured it out already, but. Malia and I have been hanging out a lot. And then she, uh. She kissed me. And now--”

“You like her?”

Lydia flattens out on her bed, looks up at the pattern her fan makes, shadows circling on her wall. “Too much,” she says. “It scares the shit out of me.”

Danny laughs. “Yeah,” he says. “I know what that's like.”

And how nice is _that_ , to hear. “ _I know what that's like_ ”.

Lydia listens to the air conditioner. To her own breathing, echoing, turning robotic.

“What do I _do_ ?” She says. “I don't want to _hurt_ Stiles-- God, I _love_ him. But I don't-- but not like--”

“Yeah,” Danny says. “It's tough.”

Lydia sighs.

There is a pause. Danny says, “and- hey, of course you shouldn't tell anyone before you feel ready. But...”

“Yeah. If he finds out a year on, instead, it’d--”

“See?” Danny's voice gets clearer, suddenly, like he's moved the phone closer to his ear. “You don't need my advice, Lydia. Hell, you never did.”

She laughs. “Hah. This time- but _just_ this time, don't get a big head- I feel like-- I need _someone_ ’s advice, anyway.”

Danny makes a sympathetic noise. There's a pause. “So.” He says. “Tell me about her.”

And something opens up on Lydia’s chest-- there'd been a lot of that lately. Things cracking open inside her, like she is one big nesting doll, like it is Lydias all the way down and then, way inside, just a wooden, hollow space.

Anyway. Something opens up in her, because, apparently, she has been _dying_ for someone to ask this question. For someone who lives with a foot always in a secret world, Lydia’s not actually a huge fan of secrets.

“She's so _stubborn_ ,” Lydia says, and Danny laughs, and they talk.

* * *

“Sounds like you guys make a good team,” Danny says, before she hangs up, and Lydia says,

“Yeah. We do.” Finds herself smiling. Christ. This whole thing has turned her into a sap.

Danny says, “you should probably talk to Stiles, Lydia.”

“I know.”

* * *

One of Lydia’s favourite places in the whole world is a deli beside the North Road Automall. North of where, Lydia’s not sure. It's just one of those places you drive by on the highway, not noticing it unless your car breaks down within towing distance, or you really need to pee. The deli is just called the Automall Deli. There's something nice about that-- the simplicity.

When Lydia needs to get out of Beacon Hills, and she has the gas money to spare, that's where she goes. The Automall Deli, just off the highway. The air has that gasoline smell. The deli does Ruebens for four dollars. Four-fifty, if you want a coffee. Lydia always gets the Rueben, and the coffee, and then she sits at the counter in the front window and watches people put stickers on used cars, or fix tires for people who’ve just pulled off the road.

They repair ambulances, there, too. Somewhere must, Lydia supposes, though is always strange to see them up on jacks, or with the bumpers off. Something out of place about it.

The Rubens are amazing. Rye made in-house.

The coffee is-- okay. Worth fifty cents, for sure.

Lydia heads there, the day after she calls Danny. There are storm clouds bunched up on the horizon like waves curling up to break, but Lydia bets it's not really gonna rain that hard.

They're in a drought.

They're  _always_ in a drought.

The barista says, “hey, ruben!” As he recognizes her. Turns to pour a coffee. Lydia puts a five on the counter.

It's good here. Simple. She sometimes wishes her life could loop, like this. Walking in the door, putting money on the counter, getting her cheap coffee, and repeat.

She's never taken anyone out here. Told anyone about it.

Her mom asked, once, in the thick of the Peter madness that swept Lydia permanently just-off of sanity, “where do you go all day?” And Lydia said,

“Driving. I like to listen to the radio. Top 40s, you know?”

Her mother had nodded. “I don't _get_ pop music,” she’d said.

When your ditzy popular girl act is so convincing your own mother buys it, does it stop being an act?

Lydia wonders, sometimes, how much of her is real anymore. If you put her in the ground, how much would even rot? How much would just stay, like all the millions of plastic bottles packed in cubes way underground? How much is even flesh and bone?

Anyway.

She doesn't tell her mother- doesn't tell anyone- because part of her likes the idea that if she got lost out here, they wouldn't know where to look.

She'd just disappear. End up on milk cartons, maybe, and then thousands of iterations of her face, packed in cubes, would wind up underground, forever. Never rotting.

She eats her Ruben. It's excellent. She drinks her coffee. It's okay. She reads a book.

She leaves, and as she is passing by an ambulance, parked neatly up on blocks, the Banshee in her gives a powerful, an adamant, tug. Like there is a string tied around her small intestine, right behind the belly button, and it is yanking her backward.

Lydia does not look at the ambulance. She takes a deep breath. Gasoline, oil, that banana-smell of whatever cleaning chemical they use.

The banshee in her tugs, insistent. _Here, look,_ it says. _Come be the bearer of bad news_.

Lydia does not look. She takes another breath. Oil, again. Gas and fruit. She gets in her car.

She leaves. 

* * *

She wakes up that night behind the wheel of her car, headlights on, indicating for the turn that'll take her into the Automall lot.

Tick-tick, tick-tick, goes her turn signal.

The Automall’s empty and dark. eerie. The shadows, where they deepen the night, are greasy, somehow.

They _drip_

The banshee, in Lydia’s gut, tugs.

Lydia makes the turn. She puts her car in park. _Here, this way_ , the Banshee tells her.

Lydia makes a phone call.

* * *

“Everything okay?” Malia says, when she arrives.

She is sweaty, a little. Out of breath.

Lydia says, “did you _run_ here?”

Malia stuffs her hands into her pockets. “Didn't have the car today,” she says. “So?”

Lydia lets her hands ease from the wheel of her car. “I woke up _here_ ,” she says, and there is a pause while they both take in the Automall, dark around them, cars in various states of disrepair and the sharp smell of gasoline, home miles away down the road.

“Oh,” Malia’s eyebrows tic up. “Glad your Banshee can drive.”

Lydia laughs. “I guess,” she says.

Malia takes a deep breath, sticking her nose into the wind. “Don't smell anything dead,” she says. “Hard to tell, though. Mostly just gas out here.”

Lydia nods. “It's this way,” she says. “Whatever it is.”

Malia shucks off her windbreaker, dumps it into Lydia’s car. Frees up her arms. “Well,” she says. “Lead the way. Been a boring week, anyway.”

Lydia leads the way. Lets the Banshee pull her back towards those ambulances, white and red and all in a row.

The ground under their feet, oil-slick, throws back rainbows from the dark asphalt. It's eerie, in the monochrome night.

She stops at the ambulance second from the left. Dirty, these big arcs of dust sprayed up over the wheel wells.

“Here,” she says.

The closed doors at the back of the truck loom enormous in her sight. Threatening.

She tries the handle-- locked. “Would you do the honours?”

Malia grunts. Wrenches the lock open with a flash of monster-strength, steps back shaking the stiffness out of her hand. “Ambulance B&E,” she says, flat. “Probably going to a new ring of hell for that.”

“Probably!” Lydia agrees, mock-cheerful, and Malia pulls a face.

It's better, having her here. The night is still dark, around them, but Lydia’s not really scared of whatever's lurking in the shadows.

Not to get all Walter White about it, but. They _are_ the ones who lurk.

“You gonna get the door, or should I?”

Lydia scoffs. “Not even going to hold the door for me? Chivalry really is dead.”

Malia shrugs. “It's Beacon Hills. Might not stay dead long.”

Lydia laughs, and reaches for the door, and realizes what this is. What they're doing.

They're _flirting_.

And when she's not overthinking it to the moon and back-- it's almost easy. It's almost-- it's kind of _n_ _ice_.

She opens the ambulance doors.

Inside, the ambulance is--

“It's empty.”

Malia appears beside Lydia, frowns into the darkness. “Yep,” she agrees. “Nothing in there.” She takes a breath, nose wrinkling up. “Smell something, though.”

“What kind of ‘something’?”

Malia looks over at her, eyes mirror-shiny in the dark, pupils devouringly huge. “Blood,” she says.

* * *

They make a thorough search of the ambulance. Nothing and more nothing until Malia, hunched by the back wheel, says,

“Oh, found it.”

Lydia squats next to her, on the oily pavement.

“There.” Malia points to something, hidden in the wheel well.

A bit of scalp, blood and hair and skin plastered up against the steel. A piece the size of a quarter. Lydia thinks she sees a bit of ear, clinging to the bottom edge.

Nausea makes a chew-toy of her stomach.

“He's dead,” she says. Knows it like she knows how to breathe and how to eat. “He-- the guy it's from. He's dead.”

“Okay,” Malia says. “So. Does your… _thing_ usually pick on on parts?”

Lydia looks at the bit of skin, hair and old blood plastered to the ambulance like a gruesome sticker. “No,” she says. “It doesn't.”

“Well.” Malia straightens up, and Lydia, now at knee height, hears the distinct _crack_ of joints and cartilage, the human core of Malia groaning to accommodate her. “Something _really_ awful must have happened to him.”

“Ha,” Lydia says, and thoughtlessly reaches a hand up. Malia tugs her upright with a grunt.

They end up in each others’ space, close enough Lydia can see the sweat beading on Malia’s upper lip.

Malia blinks. Lydia blinks. The sky overhead is dark, middle-of-nowhere dark, and it smells like oil and fruit, and above that, obliterating that all, Malia. All Lydia can see. All she can _smell_ , practically, sweat and laundry soap looming large over the gasoline.

“Well?” Malia says, like she has been saying all night.

 _Well?_ Lydia asks herself.

She feels, a little, completely out of her depth, Malia watching her across the scant inches between them. There’s no full moon, No magic-hour sunrise. No-- no _excuse_.  Just them in a grimy parking lot, some dead man’s scalp a foot from their knees. 

Lydia cups her hand around the back of Malia’s head, low, where her skull meets her spine. It seems the most important thing, suddenly, to get her hand in Malia’s hair. Lydia scrubs her fingertips against Malia’s scalp, experimentally, and Malia’s breath comes out in a puff.

She looks-- entertained, almost, and Lydia leans in, and kisses the smile right off her mouth. Lydia’s hand tightens in Malia’s hair, a fraction, and in return, Malia puts her hand dead-centre in Lydia’s chest.

 _Dead_ centre, and Lydia pulls back a fraction and says, feeling the rasp in her voice, “you _missed_.”

Malia, affronted, says, “I didn’t _miss_. I’m not used to--” she gestures at Lydia’s boobs.

Lydia laughs. She has to. She can’t _not_ , the two of them in a closed-for-the-night car lot, kissing in the shadow of a busted ambulance.

Malia snorts, and then grab’s Lydia’s hand, tugs her backwards so she’s sandwiching Malia between herself and the ambulance. Lydia follows the momentum, kisses the soft skin at the hinge of Malia’s jaw, and Malia’s hand comes up, smooths across Lydia’s back. It feels just as it ought. Heat, despite the setting, makes its nest low in Lydia's gut.

“We can’t,” Lydia says, “Make out against an ambulance.”

Malia shrugs. "Obviously," she says, "we  _can_." and Lydia feels another laugh, rushing up past the heat in her gut. Malia, with her arm still warm across Lydia’s shoulders, lets her head fall back-- laughs, too, the long column of her throat bare to the night.

They’re the scariest thing in that fucking parking lot. Scalp in the wheel-well or no.

* * *

Lydia does some research, anyway. Accidents in the area. Knows immediately when she sees him, this gut-deep _ping_ like a plane on a radar. Normal looking guy, really, all told. The picture of him she finds is on page three of The Beacon. Looks like it was ripped from the guy’s Facebook page; there's a filter over it, a tacky, I-Just-Found-Out-My-Phone-Could-Do-This vignette. Lydia pushes that thought away. Best not to think ill of the dead(‘s instagram pictures). He's got glasses on a little crooked. A blue T-shirt, superman logo on the front.

Car accident, the article says. Seven witnesses. No clues as to how the scalp got up by the ambulance's tires, but hey. Maybe that sort of thing just happens, to ambulances. Nothing supernatural about it, at all. The guy-- Glen, Glen Peterson, came around a blind corner on his bike. Got clipped by car speeding to get through a yellow light.

The driver suffered minor injuries. Glen wasn't wearing a helmet.

Just. The kind of simple, mundane tragedy happening every day in the dozens. In the hundreds, even. Bad luck. Not their jurisdiction. 

* * *

She texts Scott, anyway, and Stiles, she says, _see what you can dig up._

Scott sends her the link to that same Beacon article.

Stiles says, _can't find anything, but we can meet up if you think it's serious?_

Lydia thumbs her phone off. Lets her head rest foreword against the desk, heat and dust blowing off her computer. 

* * *

When Lydia wakes up, she has another text, this time from Malia. _How’s our dead guy_?

 _Car accident_ , she says. _The Banshee must be misfiring._

Malia’s dots appear, disappear. _That happen a lot?_ She ends up with.

* * *

No.

It doesn't. 

* * *

A week goes by. Lydia blows off Stiles, on Tuesday, but when Malia texts her on Wednesday Lydia agrees to hang out immediately, do not pass functioning brain cells, do not collect $200.

They meet at Lydia’s place. Her mom’s not around, as usual, and Malia looks around and says, “well, this is weird.”

Lydia laughs. “Yep.”

They don't-- haven't, really, hung out before. Just _hung out_ , not when there isn't a case to solve, or someone else around.

Malia drops onto the sofa and starts to wrestle off her shoes. Doesn't bother with the laces.

“So.” Malia tips her head back to look at Lydia, who's closing the front door. “That dude in the ambulance. It was nothing?”

“Well.” The lock _clunks_ shut. Lydia turns. “He _was_ dead.”

Malia sits up straighter. “ _Was_?”

Lydia corrects her tenses. "Is."

“Oh.”

“Don't look so disappointed,” Lydia says, around a laugh.

“Sue me. It's been a boring summer.”

* * *

They order pizza. Malia puts most of it away by herself, and Lydia looks at all the lean, skinny of her and says, instinctive, without heat, “I hate your metabolism sometimes.”

Malia gives her this flat, scaly look, then, that makes Lydia squirm. The aftertaste of her thoughtless, her trained-in joke, goes sour in her mouth.

* * *

When Lydia was 13, she had a stomach ache for a week straight, no other symptoms, and so she picked herself up and marched on over to the doctor’s office, as soon as she got out from school.

The receptionist had peered over and past her, as if Lydia’s mother was lurking in the corner somewhere.

Lydia, voice still little-kid high, said, “oh, I came by myself. It's only a checkup.”

The receptionist blinked down at her. Lydia, all the smug preteen of her, had thought, _well,_ it wasn't _her_ fault if the receptionist was slow. Lydia was in _middle school,_ she was old enough to come to the doctor's on her own and, yes, of course she had her insurance information.

WebMD and Lydia’s young, overactive mind had thought: appendicitis, maybe, and it would be kind of a shame to miss all that school, if it was, but better to get it checked up on, now.

The doctor tells her, no, it looks like she's been tensing her stomach all day every day, for who knows how long, and it had made the muscles sore.

Lydia Martin. Thirteen. At the doctor’s office for trying to look, subconsciously, that tiny bit smaller than she already was. 

* * *

She eats the rest of the pizza. Complains about how Dominos is way worse than it used to be, _don't you think_ , and Malia gives her that flat look that reminds Lydia, right, she was a coyote for most of her teens.

Being with Malia, since the full moon. It's like that. A constant re-remembering. A feeling like expecting your foot to come down on a step, and meeting empty air.

Not bad-- nothing close to bad, actually, but just. But disorienting, constantly.

Malia's mouth flattens, looking at Lydia. “The guy,” she says.

Lydia thinks back. “The- oh. Glen?”

“I dunno. The guy from the ambulance.”

“Glen.”

“Sure.” Malia shrugs. Wipes some pizza-grease off her fingers-- on a napkin, even, instead of just like, her pants, or the sofa, or, like she had once, on _Lydia_. “Anyway. ‘Glen.’ You're sure nothing bad happened to him?”

“He's dead.”

Malia gives Lydia a look, nose scrunched up. “You _know_ what I mean.”

“Nothing supernatural.” Lydia confirms.

Malia’s forehead creases up in the middle. “I,” she starts, and then stops. Cold discomfort runs its fingers down Lydia’s spine- she feels the pizza go to lead in her stomach.

“We don't have to have a ‘talk’, about this,” Lydia says, even though they  _s_ _hould._  Even though that's _relationships,_  isn't it, and whatever Malia and Lydia have, it _is_ a relationship. They're friends, for certain, at least, and that's a relationship, of a sort.

But she says, instead of, “okay, this is going to be awkward, but let's talk,” she says,

“We don't need to have ‘a talk’ about this.” It is perhaps not the right thing to say. But she is 18. She is only human (well. Mostly human).

“I know,” says Malia, who is also 18, who is perhaps a little less human. “I don't want to have ‘a talk’. I just-- didn't mean to freak you out. The other day. You know, fuck up your Banshee-whatever.”

It might come with its own horror sting. The Other Day. _The full moon,_  Lydia translates.

“You didn't,” Lydia says. “I'm not freaked out.”

Malia gives her a scaly look. Lydia remembers just how little she can lie, where Malia is concerned. She folds shut the top of the pizza box, makes busy with tidying. “Okay,” she relents. “Maybe I am freaked out, a little. But it wasn't _you_.”

“Okay,” Malia says. “Whatever. Just asking” and Lydia’s unease pitches suddenly into affection, for Malia, every prickly, concerned inch of her.

“Okay,” Lydia agrees. Drops the pizza box and twists around and kisses Malia- a peck, chaste, and when Malia makes a satisfied noise and reaches to pull Lydia closer, Lydia turns and makes her way to the recycling.

“Wash your hands,” Lydia calls, as she crams the pizza box into a small enough shape to fit the bin. “I don't want to find tomato sauce in my hair, later.”

Malia makes an affronted noise, from the other room, but then Lydia hears the bathroom door open, the tap run.

Lydia washes her hands, too.

* * *

They don't hook up. That night.

It's all new and strange, is the thing, and Lydia’s mom isn't supposed to be home, but who knew with her, and--

And. _Stiles._

Malia gets her hands under Lydia’s shirt, and if the remote is digging into Lydia's back, where she's lying on it on the couch, well-- she can't really bring herself to _care,_  because Malia’s hands are _warm_ on the skin of her ribs, and her mouth is on Lydia’s neck, but--

She pushes at Malia’s shoulders, and Malia sits up off Lydia. Frowns.

“Stiles,” Lydia says, again. Her voice comes out-of-breath, comes a little raspy. “I have to--”

“Oh. Yeah.” Malia’s shirt is open a button and Lydia can see the flush on her chest. Wants to reach up and press her palm against it, like Malia had at the Automall, dead-centre. Lydia takes a deep breath. It does not shake, even a little, because she is Lydia Martin, she is unflappable, she is--

“Man,” Malia complains, clambering upright. “I'm all fuckin- sticky,” and Lydia thinks she means like, at least 95% sweat, because it's a billion degrees outside, but the other five percent is a bit alarming.

She laughs, anyway. “Yeah,” she says.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> "hey c whats your fantasy? what are you writing wish fulfillment fic about?" "idk maybe im like. a monster and im too strong to be afraid of anyone hurting me, even outside in the dead of night. and also there's a pretty girl i guess?" (this isnt really wish fulfillment fic but like. thats how it is sometimes)
> 
> anyway yikes! (this chapter is actually one of the first things i wrote in this fic! i was just walking past a car lot and listening to fuckin revisionist history and this scene marched up and squatted on my brain till i wrote like. half a nanowrimo of teen wolf fanfic to accommodate it. that's how it be sometimes)  
> (also dont make out w someone in a deserted car lot if you are already dating someone else. bad form, lydia.)


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> oh babey its malia time  
> (also there's some more [offscreen] fuckin' in this chapter [like, VERY offscreen]. skip from the line break after Febreze is mentioned if you dont want to read that. just a heads up)

Here's the thing. Malia isn't stupid. She may not be as smart as some of the people they run with, but she isn't  _ stupid. _

And she may have been-- well. A coyote, for most of her formative years. But since coming back, she was pretty quick to pick up that she  _ probably  _ wasn’t supposed to be kissing other girls. 

So maybe it should have occurred to her that Lydia might wig out, a little. But Malia honestly never,  _ ever _ gave a shit. She’s already a half-feral fucking  _ werecoyote _ , like, what, adding “and bisexual, too!” onto the end of that is gonna make people blink? 

She liked Stiles. She’d liked Kira, briefly, before she smelled like Scott all-over and then that was weird. Out of all the things Malia had to feel like a freak about, that’d never ranked. 

It was only that Lydia never seemed to be freaked out by  _ anything _ . Like-- anything. Freaked-out Lydia is Malia’s barometer for when shit has gone from “run of the mill Beacon Hills freaky” to “run for cover” freaky. Lydia is Malia’s deer-fleeing-from-a-forest-fire. When Lydia is wigged, there is disaster on the horizon. Without fail. 

Except this time. ‘Cause Lydia’s also the kind of overthinker that Stiles is (which, gross, thinking about them in relation to each other, now that Malia has had both their tongues inside her mouth, is Weird, but whatever). Which means:

That morning, after the full moon, Malia had yawned so wide her jaw  _ creaked _ , and she had opened her eyes, and there Lydia had been, backlit by the rising of the sun. She’d looked away from Malia, immediately, colour coming up in her cheeks like windburn. 

How--

How could Malia  _ not _ want her, there? In the woods she’d grown up in, the smells of her ground, her territory, rich around them. The kind of comfortable she never was in Beacon Hills, and out here because Lydia thought to bring her on a chase, instead of locking her inside. 

And, look, she doesn’t mean it as a metaphor, as an allegory for anything. Only that Lydia took the problem of the full moon and gave Malia the forest and the wide, open roads. 

And so Lydia touches Malia’s cheek, and Malia kisses her, nose full of pine and earth and Lydia, Lydia, Lydia. 

* * *

It is, maybe, that Lydia Martin is the kind of person who's expected to be eighteen hundred things at once, and probably has been since birth, and the only thing Malia Tate was ever supposed to be was dead.

And when that turned out not to be true, everyone was pretty thrilled about it. (Well. Except her mom, but that's a whole other thing).

It’s this:

She is six months out of the woods. She is four months out of Eichen House. Stiles is sitting cross-legged on his bed, and there are flashcards stacked up in great drifts around him, each margin-to-margin with his cramped handwriting. 

She’s really trying her best not to fidget, but the door is closed, and the window is closed, and she’s miles out from her territory. 

“Okay,” Stiles says, and gropes around the bed for the  _ right _ flashcard, whatever the right one is. He reminds her of a badger, a weasel, some rooting thing, something with more teeth and claws than you give it credit for. “Growling. Appropriate?”

“Never,” Malia answers. She knows that one. Stiles grins at her, his teeth showing crooked on one side, and Malia’s coyote bristles, and Malia the-- not the human, but. Whatever she is. The whole of her. Malia Tate smiles back, because she knows the show of teeth isn’t a threat. The winter, outside, is fog and a brisk rain, and Malia Tate sits on Stiles Stilinski’s carpet, and looks up at him, sock-feet and worn-out jeans against his freshly washed bedspread.

She learns more about being human there, sitting on Stiles’s pilling rug and watching him drum his fingers on his thighs, than she does from any flashcard. Stiles is so breathtakingly, so fragiley  _ human _ . it bleeds off him. It fills the room. 

Malia loves him, for that, until she doesn’t. 

* * *

Later, in that same bridge of time when she is learning not to snarl at pedestrians, Lydia hauls Malia into her closet and lets her root around. Tells her,  _ no _ , unfortunately you can’t get away with just wearing the same pair of shorts every day until the denim wears through, but she can borrow what she wants from Lydia, in the meantime.

Lydia’s room is tidy, airy, but the closet is crammed with boxes that reek of dust, mildew. Malia fishes out a box and holds up an old green jacket, plenty of pockets to go around. It smells like gunsmoke, blood, and-- something else. Something that the were-beast in her recoils at. Something  _ toxic _ . But. Whatever. She’d just learned how to do laundry. She could deal with that.

Except Lydia goes white around the jaw, when she sees it, and says, “That’s not-- mine,” in a way that really means, “You can’t have that,” and so Malia stuffs it back into the box. 

* * *

They are crammed onto the edge of Lydia’s bathtub, later, and Lydia is showing Malia how to shave. 

She gets the top layer of skin, with the razor- Malia can smell Lydia’s blood in the air, her skin open to infection, even if she isn’t actively bleeding. The hard edge of the tub digs into Malia’s thighs. 

“This is stupid,” she complains, fighting back canine teeth as the smell of fresh blood pools in the cramped room. 

“Maybe,” Lydia says. “But it’s this or wear pants.”

Malia learns to shave. 

* * *

There is a time, when Stiles is gone-ghost riders gone, wiped from memory gone- where Malia remembers how to be a woman but forgets how to be a human. 

She gets dressed, in the morning, and brushes out her hair just so, and when Scott greets her in the hall that morning she thinks,  _ threat _ in parts of her too fundamental to trace the roots of, and growls him down right there by their lockers, the stern faces of PSA posters watching her from the walls. Blood oozes, slow, from a cut on the underside of her knee, from a mishap with the razor that morning.

* * *

So maybe it should have occurred to her that Lydia might panic, a little. But honestly, Malia's want- and the subsequent kiss- didn’t filter through the careful, flash-card catalogue of ‘acceptable human behaviours’ that Malia has stacked in the corners of her mind. 

Honestly, it's this; Lydia pulls Malia from a cryo-pod, her and Scott and Malia all trying, desperately, to bring Stiles back from the Railway. Honestly, the lights are dim, and the rain and wind outside are competing to bring Beacon Hills down around their ears. 

Scott’s face is all creased up in a weapons-grade frown, and Malia turns on Lydia and growls, frustration making an efficient grease fire of her insides. “I almost  _ had _ him,” She says, and becomes aware, gradually, that her teeth are chattering so hard her gums bleed, with the shock of impact.

Lydia wraps an arm tight around Malia’s shoulders, warming her through, and she says, “It’s not worth losing you.”

Malia decides on her right then and there, with ice melting down the back of her shirt, with the world tearing itself apart at its seams, Lydia reaching down to tangle her fingers in Malia’s, and never mind if Malia’s claws are out. They have each other.

* * *

But. yeah. Lydia needs to break up with Stiles, first. And Malia does  _ not _ want to be present for that conversation, thanks.

* * *

 

It is one of those days when you can feel the last of the summer being yanked out from under your feet. When you look up and it's the middle of August, suddenly, and where had all the time gone?

It's not hot out. Mid-60s, at the most, but Lydia leads Stiles around to the back yard, anyway, tries to squeeze the last outdoor-weather out of August.

Plus, her room is all in boxes, mostly, the detritus of her life all sorted and packed away, and it's weird to hang out in there, with the dust and the cardboard.

Stiles drops to a seat on the hammock, shoes still on. Red converse. The tongues are shoved sideways, so Lydia can see his socks, and she abruptly, desperately wants to reach over and fix them, tug them straight.

She's barefoot. Digs her toes into the brown grass, the dirt.

Stiles nearly loses balance, on his perch, recovers, and looks up at her with this enormous smile, slightly red around the ears. “So!” He says. “Anything you want to do?”

Lydia shrugs. She moves towards a seat, and stops herself. “You want something to drink?”

Stiles shrugs. He swings a foot, sets the hammock swaying. “I'm okay.” He sits up, a little unsteadily, and gives her a once-over. Frowns. “Are  _ you _ okay?”

“Fine!” Lydia says, and  _ does _ sit down. “It's been a weird month.”

“Oh,” he says, and puts a foot down, to steady himself. “So--”

A part of Lydia spins out eight hundred different ways this could go, all out in front of her, roads to take to this conversation's conclusion. Most of her feels the confession she needs to make as a lump in her throat, some horse-pill she'd better swallow or choke.

The silence drags. Stiles says, “Lydia?” And starts to wrestle himself out of the hammock.

“I-” Lydia says, and shrinks away from him, a little. Takes a deep breath.

“You're- uh, making kind of nervous, here,” Stiles says, and the part of Lydia that always wants to take the path of least resistance is howling at her that the summer’s almost over anyway, better just to ghost him once university starts,  _ easier _ , he'll probably forget about her by then anyway--

“So,” says the part of Lydia that loves Stiles, the part of her that pushed Malia up against the side of an ambulance. “I’m gay.” And the word is startling, somehow, clumsy in her mouth. Confrontational, almost. Or at least it seems that way to Lydia, right then, sitting on that deck chair in the cool of the summer.

“Oh,” Stiles says. Blinks. Processes. The silence fills with the tick-tick-tick of a neighbour’s sprinkler, conspicuous in the drought. “I mean-- all the way?” He pulls a face. “That sounded-- I just meant--”

“No!” Lydia says. Processes, too. Then, actually-- “I don’t know. I don't think so?”

Stiles’s eyebrows rise cartoonish up his forehead. “You don’t-- So. I mean. You know,” and then he gestures to himself, elbows at sharp angles.  _ Akimbo,  _ Lydia thinks, loving him sort of helplessly, in the all the wrong- or, at least the inconvenient- ways. 

Lydia  _ does _ sit down, then, throat a deserty scrape, when she tries to clear it. Her chest hurts. “Actually,” she says. “Malia- and I have been spending a lot of time together,”

And the wheels spin, visibly, behind Stiles’s eyes. “Since the ghost riders?” He says. “You've known  _ that _ long?”

She doesn't know what math he's done to come up with that answer.

“No!” Lydia reaches out to Stiles, across the  gulf of the porch. The sprinkler hisses, next door, a cicada for the inner suburbs. “No, only since the full moon.”

Stiles’s jaw works, like he's chewing cud. His huge eyes are a little swimmy, and it swamps Lydia like an outboard motor, makes forward movement impossible. Her chest aches.

“And you two are--”

“No,” Lydia says. “I- thought I should talk to you, first.”

Stiles nods. His voice goes haunted-house creaky. “And-- so. All summer,  _ us--” _

“It,” Lydia says. Stops. Stiles's mouth works, fishily. “I  _ do _ love you, Stiles, I love you so  _ much,  _ but this-  _ us _ , hasn't felt…” She feels like she ought to be crying. Can’t quite manage it, though she’s nauseous from throat to guts. 

“What?” Stiles says, and  _ does _ stand, shoots to his feet in an overestimation of balance that has the hammock swinging hard into the backs of his knees. “Hasn't felt  _ What _ , Lydia?”

“I just think,” she says, level, “that we-” but Stiles isn't done.

“What, you think we'd be better as  _ friends _ ? After this summer? After we-”

Lydia forces herself to look up, to meet his eyes. “I'm sorry,” she says. “I didn't want to hurt you, and then-”

“Yeah,” Stiles laughs, chalk-dry, and a tear spills over down his cheek. “Well. It's a little late for that, isn't it?”

Lydia swallows. Does not cry, not in front of him. Not yet, and not here.

“Stiles,” she says, and doesn't know what she's going to say next, so maybe it's for the best that he shakes his head. Says,

“No, I think- I'm going to go.” He fixes the cable of the hammock, where it's been twisted up in the mess. Pauses, a moment, and says, low and painful, felling Lydia like a tripwire, “I never thought you would hurt me-  _ could _ , even. isn't that stupid? That I just never--” his mouth closes, teeth coming together with a clack. He scrubs at his eyes. Turns to go.

Lydia says, “I'm sorry” at his retreating back.

Stiles’s shoulders tense straight across, as if bracing for a blow, but otherwise he does not answer.

* * *

Weeks pass.

School starts.

Malia and Lydia-- well.

The day before Lydia leaves to participate in frosh week, and all that it entails, she invites Malia over.

They step, single-file, into the picked-clean bones of Lydia’s room.

“Huh,” Malia says. “Smells weird in here.”

“Febreze,” Lydia tells her. “Thought I should clean up before leaving.”

“Yeah.” Malia says. “So,”

* * *

So.

* * *

It does not go off without a hitch.

Malia, thighs bracketing Lydia’s hips, a fresh hickey blooming on her neck, pulls Lydia’s shirt off, over her head, and then sits up.

Frowns down at Lydia like she’s summer school homework, that same determined line between her eyebrows. Like Lydia is a problem to be solved. Lydia, breath caught up high in her throat, puts a hand on the warm skin of Malia's thigh,

And laughs. 

Malia's frown deepens.

“Not you,” Lydia says, “just,”

Malia’s breath comes out in a huff. She is so  _ warm, _ iron muscles fit to split the tight skin overtop.

They figure it out.

* * *

“Okay?” Lydia says, once, to Malia’s wide eyes, the breath caught way up in her throat.

“Yeah,” Malia says, “ _ yes _ .”

* * *

After, Lydia goes to the washroom and stares at herself in the mirror. Sweaty, legs shaky, she pushes away the hair that is plastered to her forehead and tries to figure out if she looks any different, than she had.

* * *

She doesn't.

It is only her.

It is only Lydia, as she has always been, staring back at herself with a hickey and her lipstick smeared and nothing changed, at all.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> uhhhhhh i dunno sorry this one took longer it is. school again and i have like two hundred pages of reading a week apparently so it is Not So Good maybe.  
> Anyway i love malia shes so Rude and also. I shouldnt need 2 tell you this but Do Not Act Like These Teens Are Acting, they're making bad choices, fictional characters arent always good role models, psa, im not your mom, etc etc etc  
> concrit welcome, find me on tumblr, you know the drill (especially please tell me if i am getting my fahrenheit or other americanisms wrong)


	6. Chapter 6

Weeks pass.

Lydia’s classes are-- very interesting. Her classmates are mostly older than her. Are mostly not from middle-of-nowhere towns in California.

An upperclassman in Lydia’s obligatory-humanities-credit course, some 100-level GRSJ, has an enormous class ring engraved with ‘IHTFP’. It sits thick on his finger, bright-new and menacing, like an abbreviated brass knuckle.

“What's that mean?” She asks, and he gives her a too-wide grin, molars showing. Says, facetious, 

“I have truly found paradise.” Lays a hand flat-palmed over his heart, so the class ring winks in the light.

The trained-in, Beacon Hills part of Lydia twitches, whispers,  _ cult _ ! In the back of her mind.

* * *

She looks it up later. It's an inside joke with upperclassman. Apparently.

It actually stands for

“I hate this fucking place”

* * *

_ Cult _ . Yeah, right.

* * *

All of MIT feels like that, really, for the first little while. Like an enormous inside joke she isn't in on, that weird small town kid who enrolled as a junior.

* * *

Her and Malia don't really text. Stiles doesn't respond to her messages, and Lydia eventually stops trying.

* * *

She learns. She aces tests. She doesn't make very many friends, among her classmates (too young)   _ or  _ the other first years (too “that weird kid taking third year courses”)

She hears a howl, out on the campus one night. Not a supernatural one. A coyote, probably, the normal kind, and Lydia’s chest goes high-altitude with homesickness. Her vision swims.

* * *

 

It's not that she regrets coming to MIT, only.

It's harder than she thought. All of it.

Only, her mother had dropped her off at the dorms and driven back to California, and Lydia had  _ known _ it was a long way to Beacon Hills, from Massachusetts, but it's only--

But it really is an  _ awfully  _ long way. Is all. And not a friendly face for miles.

* * *

 

And then: there is a knock on Lydia's dorm room door, one afternoon a month into her first term. She opens it to find a fidgety Malia Tate, in running shoes and easy-to-wriggle-out-of clothing.

“Oh,” Lydia says, like she hasn't been keeping track, halfway hoping, like she doesn't already know. “It's the full moon tonight, isn't it?”

Malia bares a mouthful of predator teeth and says, “yeah, so, let’s  _ go _ .”

“Malia,” Lydia says, “I’m--” and gestures to herself, leggings and a baggy tshirt, hair in a ‘please dry while I'm asleep’ braid, bra tossed somewhere across the room. “-in my pyjamas.”

“And if you don't want me turning full coyote in this hallway, you'll stay in them.”

A girl walking past laughs, when Malia says that, and offers her a hi five. Malia returns it, frowning. “The people here are weird,” she says, and fidgets, and Lydia hears the subvocal growl in her voice. And, well.

What choice does she have, really?

Or, more accurately; she’d had a choice about things like this, a long time ago, but she'd already made it. Made it a hundred times over.

“Let me put on my shoes, at least,” Lydia says, and then Malia drags her out of the dorm by the hand.

* * *

Her skin is warmer than Lydia'd remembered. Calloused, where the soft sides of their knuckles touch.

She holds on, tight. 

* * *

 

“Okay,” Lydia says, as they drive through Boston. “How long do we have until the moon’s out?”

“Two hours,” Malia says, immediately. “And twenty three- no, twenty two minutes.”

Lydia stares at her across the console.

“What?” Malia says. “I have an app. And eyes on the road, anyway.”

Lydia looks back at the traffic. It seems awfully dark, already, and them in the thick of the downtown, people and cars coursing, choking, all around them.

“Okay,” Lydia says, thinking. “The outdoors club has a cabin. Hiking trails, long back roads.”

“How long to get there?” Malia’s leg is bouncing in the footwell-- Lydia can hear it, the dull  _ thump thump thump  _ as her heel makes contact.

“Three hours?” Lydia guesses. “I've never been.”

Malia nods. Knots up her hands, where they rest on her thighs. “Okay,” she says. “Turn the radio on, then.”

* * *

There's nothing good playing. Top 40s stuff, mostly, and the summer’s one big pop song isn't really good enough for the repetition it's getting.

Malia hums along.

Lydia turns the volume up, a notch.

They drive.

* * *

 Somewhere around the one-hour mark, they stop at a chip truck. One of those ubiquitous roadside ones, that sell ‘fresh’ fish & chips no matter  _ how  _ close you are you the water.

“Are you sure we have time?” Lydia says.

“Yes,  _ mom _ , I’m sure.” Malia rolls her eyes, clambering out of the passenger seat, and Lydia grimaces.

“Ugh,” she says. “I've seen you naked too many times for you to call me mom, even as a joke.”

Malia closes the car door and turns, to meet Lydia’s eyes over the bonnet. Grins. Wolffish, Lydia would say, all these teeth in it, but she knows a couple wolves, and none have ever looked at her like that.

* * *

The fries are good. Hot, greasy. Malia drenches hers in vinegar and offers Lydia one, grinning when Lydia backs away from it, wrinkles her nose.

“ _ I _ don't even like how those smell,” she says, “I don’t know how  _ you _ stand it.”

Malia, super-senses and all, crams a vinegary fry into her mouth, ketchup smearing onto her cheek.

It is a testament, really, that despite how much blood Lydia has seen in her life, she does not for a second make the comparison. She does not think of all the times she has seen Malia bleeding, with the bright-red ketchup there echoing injury on her lip.

Rather, she says, “you've got a little--” and points, and Malia pauses, deliberately. The evening air is cool around them, fresh with early autumn, and Lydia digs her fingertips into the crunchy, dying grass.

She passes Malia a napkin.

Likes to think she imagines the disappointed line that dents Malia’s forehead, before she wipes her mouth.

* * *

 Somewhere around an hour and a half, Malia’s hand finds Lydia’s, on the centre console. Her skin is warm, a balm against the cool of the evening, and when Lydia steals as a look, from the corner of her eye, Malia’s staring, determined, out the window.

She gives Lydia’s hand a squeeze. Gentle. Nothing close to all her strength in it. Lydia squeezes back.

* * *

There is very little traffic. Dusk on a Tuesday, it’s just them and the poor schmucks who decided a two-hour commute sounded better than an apartment in the city.

Lydia was spoilt by Beacon Hills, maybe, but she can't imagine choosing to be trapped in a car four hours a day just for a little post-stamp of backyard. There's something nice about being in a city, too. All the people around, everywhere, this constant, anonymous crush.

Still. 

The other commuters peel off, one-by-one.  Malia’s fidgeting, her humming along with the radio, becomes full-on twitching. Becomes the occasional growl.

Lydia meets her eyes in the rearview, and Malia’s have gone blue clear to the pinprick pupil.

Lydia turns off the highway. Her tires crunch onto a gravel road, and the GPS squalls that they should turn around, that this is a less direct route, that this is a  _ terrible _ way to get where they're going.

_ Story of my life _ , Lydia thinks.

They chug along. Malia fidgets. “How long have we got?” Lydia says, and Malia doesn't have to pull out her phone, to check the app.

“Not long,” she says. 

Lydia pulls over. The air smells, distantly, of forest. Dryer than the forest back home. Younger. “We’re half an hour out,” Lydia says, and pops the locks on the door. “Race you?”

Malia’s mouth opens into a fearsome grin, a knife-blocks’ worth of points, and Lydia grins back. The sky goes purple, overhead, and Malia dumps her clothes into the footwell of Lydia’s car. Takes off into the evening.

* * *

 Lydia kills the radio- it’s between stations more than it isn't, out here, fuzzing from one small-town DJ to another, but mostly it is the sound of dead-static, trying its hardest to resolve into voices.

A little too close to home, for Lydia’s tastes. 

She rolls the windows down, for all that it lets the chill in. Listens to the crunch of her tires on the gravel, the racket of air whistling past.

She thinks she loses Malia, once or twice, but when she slows down, she sees her-- like a cartoon monster, eyes gleaming out in the darkness.

* * *

 The MIT outdoors club have a cabin near Groton. Lydia’s a little sorry Malia isn't in the car with her, as they cross the state line. 

She stops at a gas station and buys a Bluberry Breeze (™) energy drink, generic-brand, and the $4 can is so monstrously huge it barely fits in her cup holder.

She turns a corner, around a thick stand of tree and rock, half wiped-out and half wired, saccharine “Bluberry” clinging to the back of her teeth. 

And there; the mountains open up, suddenly, in front of her, like a flag unfurling. Night and forest and then the sharp, startling rack of the White Mountains, cutting a hole out of the sky.

Lydia takes a breath, reflexive, and the night splits with a howl from somewhere up the road, full-throated.

Lydia thumps her fist on the outside of the car-door, laughs. Sheer delight, bubbling up in her like carbonation, at the night and the monster that chases her through it. 

* * *

They fall into a rhythm, as before. Lydia crunches down back roads as empty as she can find, circling ever closer to the mountains, and Malia keeps pace.

The moon, low and butter-yellow, rises. Sets again.

The night passes.

* * *

 

There is a moment, when Lydia breaks free of the trees and realizes they are in the mountains, properly, rather than only approaching them. The road opens up and the trees part, and there, suddenly, is a  _ view _ that very nearly defies description. 

The world, from up in the mountains, is a net of light, spread out below as if to hold the ground at bay. Highways and headlights crisscross until the horizon. Until the world curves away.

Lydia kills the engine. 

The silence of the evening rises up under her. Startling, almost, and then there are footsteps, from the woods. A crunch of autumn leaves, and Malia creeps forward, eyes headlamp-bright. She pads up to stand beside Lydia, watch the cars, the people far below, the bright eye of the moon overhead. 

Lydia puts lets her hand rest on the dome of Malia's head- her ears twitch, where they bracket Lydia fingers. 

They look down, together. listen to the night, the far-off traffic rising up to them, like static, and it catches all at once in Lydia's Banshee instincts. White noise beginning to resolve itself to a pattern. Lydia braces for some horrible intrusion, some vision of death. It is what she is for, after all. Seeing the ugly in the world.

It is, instead, the throb of life that comes to her. The way it comes to most people, sometimes, when they are brought face-to-face with the whole wide span of humanity. 

Lydia looks down at all the thousands rushing to or from something. Feels their lives press in against her, supernatural-static or, then again, maybe just an overactive imagination. The white-noise of traffic brings her hundreds, thousands of souls, none of them dead, this inarticulate shout of  _ life _ , echoed in her supernatural instincts, in her dumb, her mundane viscera.

Banshee  _ or _ human, Lydia takes a lungful of night air, and fights back the tears suddenly pressing at her eyes. 

_ I’m alive _ , she thinks, and looks down at Malia, who looks down over the state. 

_ We’re alive.  _

And so they are. 

* * *

When they have drunk their fill of the view, Lydia slides back into the car. Malia meets her eyes through the windshield, something solemn passing between them, unspoken. 

They keep moving. 

* * *

Morning finds Lydia curled up asleep in the back seat. She wakes up, briefly, when Malia crawls in after her. The trunk rattles, and then a beat later there is Malia, newly dressed and newly human, clambering into the back seat. 

She presses herself up against Lydia’s side, and then a moment later, squirms, elbows jabbing into Lydia’s stomach. She’s so  _ bony _ , Lydia thinks, still half asleep, and makes a low, fuzzy sound of complaint. 

Malia stills. Ends up with her head in Lydia’s lap, her knees crammed spidery up against the far door. 

Lydia’s eyes drift back shut. Her hand settles in Malia’s hair. The car grows warm, with their body heat.

They sleep.

* * *

“You changed your hair,” Lydia realizes. She'd-- noticed, before, obviously, but only really,  _ really _ notices it here, with Malia’s head in her lap, with her fingers rubbing absent circles into Malia’s scalp.

Malia makes a low, pleased noise. Cracks an eye. “Yep,” she says. Her voice is still gravely with sleep. 

“Looks nice.” Lydia scratches, gentle, at the hard ridge of Malia’s skull. Malia’s eyes slide back shut.

It does. Look nice. Lydia looks down at Malia, her face softened by exhaustion, the early-morning light drawing out long shadows in the hollow of her throat. Her hair, newly cropped even  _ shorter _ , sticks up from Lydia’s playing with it, shot through with summer-sun highlights.

The car’s windows are down, the early sun filtering in at them. Two dog-walkers, so far, have passed them by and peered into the car. Industrious types, with walking sticks and windbreakers and alert, outdoorsey, mutt-looking dogs. Checking in to see if they’re okay, pulled over on the shoulder of the road.

They are. 

They’re okay. 

Lydia takes a deep breath, gets green and forest and a bit of panic, at the back of her mouth, lurking by her wisdom teeth. 

Is jerked, abruptly, from the peace of the moment, remembers what Malia and her have been, to each other.

What  _ have _ they been, to each other? And Malia so obviously, so  _ prettily  _ a woman under Lydia’s hands, (not that there was any one way to be a woman, but), and before her, Lydia had never really considered-- women, like that, but here's Malia in her lap, and heat waking up yawning in Lydia’s gut, its metaphorical teeth flashing, and--

“Mm,” Malia says. “You're still freaking out.”

“I never freak out,” Lydia says, prim, and Malia snorts. Sits up.

“Lydia,” she says. Something in her voice makes Lydia twist around so they’re properly face-to-face, even crammed in the back seat as they are.

“Thanks.” Malia jerks her chin towards the woods, crowding in at their windows. There is this startling, this naked intensity in the way Malia’s looking at her. Like a stripped wire, no insulation at all to guard them,  _ either _ of them, from the weight of this sincerity that Malia has come and dropped in Lydia’s lap. “For-- the full moon. Stuff.”

“Of course,” Lydia says, after a moment. She reaches out to grab Malia’s hand, on the seat between them. Malia flips hers palm-up, so Lydia sees the grooves and lines of her future, laid up there among the dirt and skin.

She traces Malia’s life-line, something clawing up her throat that is nearly as naked and vulnerable as Malia has just been.

“I,” Malia says, and then her mouth squashes flat. She shrugs. “If you need a favour, call.” She finishes. “I owe you.”

“We’re--”  _ what _ , Lydia thinks, and clears her throat. “Past owing each other.”

Malia blinks.

“--I’ll call,” Lydia promises. "If I need something, I mean."

And Malia nods, and swivels a little in her seat, so they're not face-on anymore. “Good,” she decides. “I'll buy breakfast.”

Lydia laughs. “Hungry?”

And Malia meets her eyes again, solemn, and says, “I am seconds away from eating the next hiker we see.”

It is a testament either to Lydia’s bizzare life or her mashed-up feelings that she is briefly touched that Malia would cannibalize a hiker, when Lydia is already right there.

* * *

They do not discuss what they were, to one another, over the summer.

They do not kiss.

The opportunity had been there and it had passed, and Lydia is left floundering in its wake.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ittts another chapter. probably 2 more after this? maybe 1?  
> i dunno. someone help these horrible children talk about their feelings.


	7. Chapter 7

One of the girls in Lydia’s dorm whistles, good-naturedly, as Lydia creeps back to her room that afternoon.

“Walk of shame, Martin?” The girl says, approving. “Didn't think you had it in ya!”

Lydia hadn't even-- she had been so wrapped up in the rest of it, she hadn't even  _ thought _ how she must look. Yesterday's clothes and yesterday's makeup and a low, messy ponytail. She looks at the girl in the dorm and she has to stop herself from visibly  _ wincing. _

_ Can't  _ stop herself from reaching up to fix her hair, a little. Make sure it covers the trepanation scars, anyway, that lie still vivid at her temples.

“No shame involved,” Lydia says, and tries for prim, for proud, for--

The girl laughs. “Naturally.” And pauses. Lydia sees the wheels turn. Then, “wait, not that girl from last night-?”

“Malia,” Lydia says, automatically. “And-- no. We’re just old friends. From back home.”

“Right,” the girl says. 

Lydia squirms.

“Well.” The girl shrugs. “Have a good one.”

Lydia gives her a smile, tight at the corners. “You too.”

“And--” the girl says, to her retreating back. “If you ever want to talk about your uh-- old friends. Pride society’s got a girls’ night on Tuesdays.”

Lydia blinks. “Thank you,” she says. “But I think I'll focus on my  _ school work _ .” Slides so easy back into that chilly preppy kid she barely notices it happen. Digs her nails into the palms of her hands. Chin up. Back straight. 

The girl shrugs. “Suit yourself.” 

Lydia marks next Tuesday afternoon in her calendar. She takes a shower that lasts the better part of the next 45 minutes.

When Malia texts her,  _ home safe _ , something rises up in Lydia, like helium.

* * *

She  _ has _ always been good at compartmentalizing. But every container will spring a leak. Eventually.

* * *

She has an assignment due, on Wednesday. That takes precedence over some-- pride meeting. 

* * *

Malia texts Lydia, mid-week, to show her a picture of a bug monster she and the underclassmen had fought. 

“How ugly is this dude,” the text says, and Malia’s hand, dinged and bloody, takes up about half the frame with a thumbs-up.

This-- this  _ something _ , this fondness too big for words, expands in Lydia’s chest.

* * *

She goes to the next pride meeting. She's curious.

No, she's… collecting data. Testing a hypothesis.

No. She's-- 

She doesn’t know  _ what _ she is.

* * *

It is fun, mostly. A group of people who don’t see her as just that weird freshman taking third-year courses. 

It is intimidating, too, in large part, but Lydia Martin is never  _ intimidated.  _ She  _ does _ the intimidating.

A--  _ handsome _ , Lydia thinks, a  _ handsome _ second-year with trimmed-short hair asks Lydia if she’s “busy, later?”

And this pleased thrill knots up Lydia’s stomach, but her first thought is,  _ no, of course I can’t go out with you _ . 

Her first thought is of  _ Malia _ . 

* * *

They text, most days.

They talk, but they don’t Talk. 

Malia shows up for the next full moon, and then Lydia goes home for the full moon and the Thanksgiving weekend both (convenient, that). 

And then, a week after that, Malia shows up, again, on her doorstep, without warning.

* * *

It has been barely eight days since they last saw each other. 

Malia is in shorts too short for the weather, for the frost that clings to the outside edges of the leaves, to the back of Lydia’s windows. 

Lydia sees her, waiting outside the residence building, and her heart climbs up into her throat. 

_ I missed you, _ she thinks. 

She lets Malia in. 

Thanks God that MIT has single dorms.

Lydia leaves the door open, a crack, but Malia closes it.

At Lydia’s hairy eyeball, she shrugs. “I don't feel trapped, with you,” she says, and what's Lydia supposed to do, with that? With the  _ weight _ of that, the confession Malia has dumped at her feet like a cat might deposit a bird it's caught.

Lydia says, helplessly, “God, I missed you.”

And Malia turns, and looks at her, something softening at the corners of her mouth. 

They kiss.

God, of  _ course _ they kiss. Lydia just  _ blinks _ and her back is to the door, and Malia’s got her mouth at the bend of her jaw and it’s like time has been stopped for the last three months, has restarted only here, now, in the closing of distance between them, and it’s--

God, it's just--

Malia pulls back, a hair, rests her forehead on Lydia’s shoulder, and Lydia’s hand goes up, on instinct, to cup the back of her neck.

“It's been too  _ long _ ,” Malia complains, into Lydia’s shirt.

Lydia makes a noise. “Three months?” She says. Is all she can think to say. Her heart is up in her throat, is beating so she’s sure Malia can hear it, is  _ hammering _ . 

Malia, head still bowed awkwardly into Lydia’s shoulder, snakes a hand up to palm at Lydia’s side, just above the ribs, skin as shocking-warm as Lydia remembers. Even through her shirt.

“What are you doing?” 

“Shut up,” Malia says, and worms her arm between Lydia and the door, till they're locked in an awkward, cramped hug, Malia pressed up, warm, against Lydia, knees-to-shoulders.

“Are you okay?” Lydia says, softer, and plays with the stray hairs at the nape of Malia’s neck. 

“Mhm,” Malia says. "Just wanted to see you."

Lydia takes a breath, at that. Steadies. Has to clear her throat.

“Then get off me. I'm starving.”

* * *

They order food. Resettle on Lydia’s floor with takeout containers steaming all around them, the window cracked, cold air filtering in.

Lydia shivers, and before she can get up to close the window Malia is there, pressed into her side.

“Do you want any beef?” She says. “Because otherwise I'm going to eat all of it.”

“Be my guest.” Lydia shoves the little tin of ginger beef in Malia’s direction. Feels warmed-through, leaning halfway against Malia’s side and watching her struggle to peel the paper lid off its container. Wants to say it again,  _ I missed you _ . Wants to push Malia down onto the stained carpet, right now, let their food go cold. 

Lydia clears her throat.  “How was that--” she reaches, for a moment. “What were you hunting down, the other week?”

Malia, having got the lid off, looks up with cheeks stuffed. “Mph,” she says, and swallows. “Harpy.”

“Right!” Lydia pries her chopsticks apart, the inside edges going all splintery. “She was-- stealing things, wasn't she?”

Malia nods. “Took about half the school library.” She brightens. “ _ Everyone  _ got extensions. No books to research with.”

Lydia laughs. “That's handy,” she says, and misses nearly violently the pack, the way they had been, back then. All chasing down some monster or other. Her throat squeezes-- and Lydia  _ never _ cries in front of other people, if she doesn't want to, mean to, but. That pack, the one she misses?

It doesn't exist, anymore. Not the way she misses it, all of them halfway grown up, now, and scattered to the ends of the country.

Lydia swallows. Rubs her chopsticks together, to sand off the rough edges.

“What.” Malia says. Not like a question, just the familiar flat of her voice. Lydia smiles. Leans further into her shoulder.

“Did you get her?” She says, eventually, to drown out the half-dozen things clamouring at her throat to be voiced, things too tender, too  _ revealing _ , to say over Chinese takeout at four in the afternoon.

“Yeah,” Malia says. “Chased her out of town anyway. Liam didn't think we should kill her over some books, or something.”

“He was probably right,” Lydia says.

“Yeah.” Malia shrugs. Spears a piece of beef with one chopstick. “He's so  _ smug  _ about it, though.”

And Lydia laughs. After a moment, so does Malia.

The wind filters in, cool, through the window. And something just- unspeakably tender, fragile, spins out in Lydia’s gut, like her grandmother’s old crystal. Thin and breakable and so  _ bright _ . So clear.

* * *

They end up twisted together on Lydia’s narrow twin bed, Malia draped over Lydia’s chest. 

She has her ear right to Lydia’s sternum, and Lydia imagines that Malia can hear the beat of her heart, imagines that Malia can maybe even hear herself, in there, where she has carved so large a space for herself. Hear the stamp she’s left on Lydia, there among the ventricles. 

Then is briefly horrified with herself, for thinking something so deeply, unflatteringly sentimental.

She sighs. Shifts, a little, to get away from the wet patch on the sheet.  Says, because it has been high in her throat for so long, caught there like phlegm, something ugly to be expunged, she says, “what are we doing?”

Malia grumbles and shifts. “ _ I'm  _ trying to nap,” she says, and Lydia laughs. Brings her hand up to run through Malia’s hair. 

God. Malia’s  _ beautiful  _ hair. 

Malia makes a pleased noise. Presses a kiss to the bare skin of Lydia’s chest. 

“I mean it, though.” Lydia’s hand stills. “What are we  _ doing? _ ”

Malia shrugs, then, shoulder bumping up on Lydia’s arm. “Whatever feels good,” she says. And then looks up, at Lydia, with a gleam of what might be  _ fear _ , deep down in her eye. “--right?”

And Lydia pauses. Feels, again, like her foot has swung out over empty space, where she'd thought there'd be a step. “--sure,” she says. “But,”

Malia sighs.  _ Sighs, _ from the bottom of her. “I don't get,” she says. “Why you  _ care _ so much.”

Lydia sits up. Feels like she has to sit up, and then Malia does, too, dislodged.

“You  _ don’t _ ?” Is what Lydia says. “You  _ don't  _ want to know what-”  _ you are _ , is what she is going to say, because it is what she's been asking herself every day, every quiet moment, flipping it around like a rubix cube with too many red tiles, fucking unsolvable. 

Every time she thinks about Stiles, or when her gut flips when she sees a pretty girl, there in the back of her head;   _ what am I?  _

“No!” Malia says. “Of  _ course _ I don’t care. Lydia, I’m-- barely fucking  _ human, _ the rest is--”

Her teeth snap shut, audibly. 

Lydia pauses. “Is. That what you think?” She says, and turns. Malia is a line of tension from her hand, bunched up in the sheets, to the tight, square corner of her jaw. 

“Well,” Malia says. Lydia’s throat aches. She puts her hand on Malia’s, gentling, flips it over to trace the lines of her palm. Half wants to say,  _ you are, you’re as human as the rest of us _ , but her and Malia both are too smart for platitudes. 

“If you aren’t human,” is what she ends up saying. “Than neither am I. Humanity is-- overrated, anyway.”

Malia turns to look at her, a confused little crease between her eyebrows. Lydia’s throat aches, still, with wanting to touch Malia, to soothe her. She gets it. About not feeling real. Feeling--  _ human _ . That tender, that  _ wanting _ feeling, rises up in her again. “Okay?” Lydia says. 

Malia nods. Grins, then, and her throat croaks, and her teeth flash pointed, where they show. “So what  _ does _ that make us?” She says. “Monsters?”

Lydia laughs. Says, in that over-serious, unironic way that teenagers get; “sure, okay. Then we can be monsters together.”

Malia snorts. Twists halfway around, and they kiss. It’s awkward, the way they’re sitting, but there’s something--

For all of Malia’s frank weirdness, her unfashion, for all the loud and mean and strange of her- hell,  _ because  _ of it- Lydia feels, increasingly, this giddy sort of helplessness, when they’re talking. 

Not Banshee-helplessness. 

But with all the boys Lydia’s dated, she’s known where she stood, has felt in control. 

Malia is confusing and scary, in a lot of ways. 

Lydia puts it out of her mind. Pulls away and shuffles around, so she has better access to Malia’s mouth. So she can put a hand on the warm, flat of her shoulder. 

But there’s still a knot in her gut. Because the thing is--

Like.

Lydia went to an anatomy museum, on a school field trip in grade 8. And she's never quite managed to shake that. The image of the storeroom, with its stark white light, all the jarred-up lungs and fetuses in neat careful rows on their shelves.

It would be nice, is all. If Malia- if her, and Malia, could be like that. All stacked up and brined and labelled in felt-tip, between the jars of spines and hearts.

But she says, instead, after a moment, “Whatever it is,” and Malia makes an inquiring noise. 

“With us. Whatever it is-- could it be  _ just _ us?”

“Sure,” Malia says. 

And that’s alright, then. They can work with that. 

* * *

And Lydia is trying-  _ really _ trying, not to go poking around her life, prodding at her past with a stick, flipping it over to see what's real or isn't.

It's a good way to go crazy, that is,  _ is this real, is this real? Jackson, was that real? Stiles? Allison, even? _

And besides- even in a normal town, when you flip over a rock, all sorts of nasty things come crawling out. 

Where she's from? You might just unearth a monster. She and Malia-- whatever that is, it's  _ real _ with a startling intensity, and Lydia is trying to focus on that. Whatever that makes her, whatever that says about her past relationships, she doesn't have to figure it out just now. It doesn't all have to be pickled and shelved. Not all at once.

It  _ doesn’t.  _

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> hmmmm im still not happy w this chapter but if i dont just say what the hell & post it, i will be poking at it forever and this fic will never end. so uh. here is this chapter.   
> idk like. I wanna be clear that this fic isn't anti-label or anything (i like labels! they're useful! if you don't, thats also fine, its about personal choice, etc etc etc) but it is, at least sort of, about not over-analyzing your life into oblivion b/c that way lies Madness lmao. (been there 2! sometimes u just gotta let it ride)  
> These 2 def also aren't handling this relationship in the most mature way but they can be forgiven that, i think, bc relationships are like. hard & junk.  
> anyway thats my obligatory disclaimer for this chapter. hope you liked it, etc etc! there are definitely absolutely only 2 chapters left. they should be out soonish.


	8. Chapter 8

Time passes. The weeks tick into months, and then second term is upon Lydia, as if by ambush. A new batch of classes, the dry cold of Massachusetts winter that cracks the skin, in the webbing between Lydia’s fingers.

She buys some industrial-strength moisturizer, the kind that smells like bees, and the next time she sees Malia, Malia scents the air, mouth open ( _weird,_ Lydia thinks, with an almost overwhelming fondness, _she’s so weird_.)

“You changed your moisturizer,” Malia accuses.

And Lydia says, “well spotted,” and kisses her in the lounge of their dorm, where _anyone_ could see. Does it without even thinking.

Malia, when they break apart, has a grin that would put the Cheshire Cat to shame.

* * *

Because, oh, yeah. They're doing- that. Still. Counting from summer, it's been almost six months, and Lydia’s become one of those horrible, sappy, long distance relationship people.

They skype a lot. Malia busses up, or drives up, sometimes, although she’s still twitchy about getting behind the wheel. For the full moon, yeah, but also, just--

Just to crash at Lydia’s dorm, or come explore Cambridge (“boring and stuffy”) and Boston itself (“good food”).

* * *

Lydia learns: Malia is _hungry_ for new experiences, in a way no one else she knows is. Anything Lydia suggests, Malia is up for, at least the first time. Music festivals, weird little artisan’s markets; she says to Lydia, one day, as they wait in line for some cheap but terrible indie film,

“I feel like-” and then clacks her teeth shut. Lydia finds her hand, under the layers of winter clothes, and squeezes.

“What?”

“I just,” Malia says. Turns her nose down, into her scarf, so Lydia can’t read her face. “Sometimes,” she offers, eventually, very low. “All that time I spent- uh,”

And they're in a crowded place, students and young hipster-types crammed in all around them, so Malia just clears her throat, says, “Away,” instead of “as a fucking coyote”.

And Lydia makes an _I'm listening_ sound, in the back of her throat.

“It's. whatever.” Malia shrugs, jerky. “I feel like I'm not gonna get that time back sometimes. So. I like. Doing stuff with you.”

Lydia’s heart nearly cracks right in two- she knows it's impossible, but swears that right then, an ultrasound would come up with fissure lines there, in the meat of her chest.

“So. Thanks. Or whatever.”

Lydia squeezes Malia’s hand, grounding, and leans into her chest, absorbs her werewolf heat-- a welcome buffer, in the chill of February.

“Any time,” she says, breezily, but really, honest to god means it.

* * *

 

So they explore Boston together. Drive up to the mountains on full moons, kiss and fuck and time passes, and they eat the fucking state _alive_ , they do. They _devour_ it.

“Making up for lost time,” Lydia says to Malia, once, and it feels a bit sappy, but she means it. Means when Malia was a coyote, but she sort of means, too, when they were friends, before, means they could have been doing this so _much_ longer, and they _hadn't been_.

* * *

 

“Hey, handsy,” Lydia says, not really a complaint, when they are out for a walk in the bombed-out winter of a botanical garden, Malia trying to wedge her hand into Lydia’s back pocket.

Malia shrugs. Relocates to just loop her arm around Lydia’s shoulders. “You love it,” she says, and Lydia doesn't even seize up at the wording.

* * *

 

She still doesn't-- know what she is. And she's trying to be zen about it, or whatever, to leave it at “kind of terrifyingly in love with Malia Tate, but who's asking!”

(Which. Love. Big fucking word, but there it is, stamped all over her).

The girl who told Lydia to go to a pride meeting, back in September, says, “give it time, Martin. It's a process.”

Malia says, “well, if you wanna make out with some guy, to see-” and then frowns, her face bunching up so much Lydia can see it over the grainy Skype call. “Actually,” she says, a strange note in her voice. “Please don't-- do that.”

Lydia doesn't. Whatever else they are, they'd agreed on that. They're exclusive.

* * *

“Your girlfriend not coming around this weekend?” Says Pride girl (her name is Dana, but, to Lydia, she's still kind of the girl that wolf-whistled at her in September).

And Lydia doesn't have to blink, or say, _who?_ Doesn't bother with an “oh, we’re not--”

It's kind of a confronting word. Girlfriend. Intimidating, maybe, but so is Malia. So is Lydia, too, come to think of it.

Lydia just says, “Malia? No.”

“Dope.” Dana grins. “You wanna come to a party?”

* * *

It turns out by “party” Dana meant “15 people and a Bluetooth speaker in a house downtown”. It is not the entire-school affair Lydia threw at the lake house, back in high school.

It's-- nice.

She gets drunk, and texts Malia, and Malia texts back,

 _Aren't you at a party? You are the least social popular kid on earth_.

Lydia texts back,

 _I've seen you growl at someone more than once._ _Glass houses on the social thing_.

Then she puts away her phone. Tries to be present, sitting on the stained-up carpet of the house, a renter 5 college kids are sharing, and it smells perpetually like beer and socks, but whoever’s chosen the music has done a good job.

There’s cheap liquor to go around, and they all sit in on the floor, or on couches, and chat. Play king’s cup, never-have-I-ever, like some echo of a high school sleepover Lydia never had.

There is something precious in the air, sleepy and intimate, and Lydia drinks vodka-and-coke out of one of the house’s shitty mugs and listens to people talk and laugh and feels a sort of tender she wants, immediately, to shove into the back of a drawer and lock away.

She cracks a joke- doesn't remember it, even as it leaves her mouth, through the pleasant cotton of alcohol, but the whole group laughs, sloppy-drunk, good natured, and Lydia’s chest goes swiss-cheese, all riddled with hollows.

Dana lets her crash on the couch-- “safer to take the bus in the morning,” she says, and Lydia wakes up fuzzy and sore from the lumpy sofa, and so at-peace content she wants kind of abruptly to cry.

* * *

It sneaks up on her, that way. Lonely freaked-out first term turning over into friends, and into Malia. Lydia learns the city. Finds a coffee shop, and goes so often they know her name and order.

“Lydia!” They say, “the usual?”

And if Lydia washed up dead, here, there would be tons of people who came looking. The idea doesn't spook her, any more.

Weird bar, maybe. She's had a weird life. Point is: part of Lydia, waydeep down, more fundamental than her lungs, than the banshee squatting in the back of her head, part of her thought she'd never really be happy, again, like she was in Beacon hills. Or-- like there was the brief potential to be, in Beacon Hills, anyway.

Like she didn't really deserve friends like that, like without the pack, no one would want to hang out with her. Barbie-doll Lydia Martin, sure she's smart and pretty but there's nothing inside but plastic and a hollow space.

It's nice, anyway. To be wrong. To grow up. To make friends. To kiss Malia at a small, intimate house party and have her friends heckle, not a hint of malice in it.

To be able to leave a drink unattended, and not worry about it, about the people she left it unattended with.

Low bar, again, maybe. But it's not just Beacon Hills that's full of monsters, for young women.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> WELL THAT took ten years!! sorry, it was thanksgiving then it was midterms so i have been BUSY. but better late than never i guess?


	9. Chapter 9

She almost dreads the summer, when it comes. Doesn't relish heading back to Beacon Hills, for all that there is a part of her that points ever west, like a crooked compass, pulling her towards the Nematon. Towards the Pack.

She packs her things into cardboard boxes, and moves them into her rental, for next year, and then she climbs into an airplane and heads on home.

Or leaves home, maybe.

Or both.

* * *

 

Malia meets her at the airport, kisses her there in front of what feels like half the state, and Lydia feels the eyes on her back like laser sights.

_ It's California,  _ she tells herself.  _ No one cares _ . She tightens her grip on Malia’s shoulder.

“Hey,” Malia says, when they part.

“Hey yourself,” Lydia says, smiling on reflex.

* * *

They drive into town-- well, Lydia drives, anyway. The sky is a uniform, dove-grey overhead, like a video game texture loaded wrong. Smog-- no. Smoke.

“The state is on fire,” Lydia comments.

Malia wrinkles up her nose. “When  _ isn't  _ the state on fire?”

* * *

The Summer ramps up slowly. May ticks over into a cool and foggy June (“Juneuary,” Lydia's mother says, clicking her tongue as she pulls a coat tight around her shoulders).

The pack returns, one by one, from their far corners, and Lydia  _ feels  _ their proximity, this itch in the supernatural parts of her. 

For all that she hasn't changed very much, she wonders, distantly, if they will recognize her, after the year apart.

* * *

She runs into Stiles. It is inevitable. She's out for groceries, no food in the kitchen and Lydia has missed having access to a fridge and oven, to a stovetop. Has grand plans to grill a salmon, even, on the barbecue. If the weather ever allows for it.

And there, testing  peaches for ripeness, is Stiles, skate shoes with the tongues pushed crooked and a fresh, neat haircut, and Lydia sees him, and the first thing she thinks is,  _ God I missed you. _

Stiles turns, and startles, tension jumping up in his shoulders.

“You know,” Lydia finds herself saying. “Peaches are more of a late summer fruit.”

“Right,” Stiles says. “Right, yeah, of course, I was--” and then his face crumples up, something bordering on sadness stamped there at his mouth. “Hi Lydia,” he says, sort of low, instead of finishing his sentence.

“Hi, Stiles,” Lydia says. 

He looks-- different. Older, maybe, a loss of baby fat around the mouth, or his hair is longer or-- something. Different. New.

Stiles clears his throat. Fidgets, trying to cram a hand into his front pocket and missing. This, at least, his awkwardness, has not changed.

“I,” Lydia says, and Stiles says, 

“Coffee? I'm-- thirsty. Summer, you know. Gotta Stay hydrated!”

Lydia doesn't point out that caffeine is a diuretic. Stiles almost certainly already knows.

“Yeah,” Lydia says. “I could go for a coffee.” 

The salmon can wait. It's too cold for barbecue, anyway. 

* * *

They end up sitting on a bit of unused grass by a parking lot, too small to call itself a park, really.

The sky is dour-gray, overhead, the sun ominous red through the smoke.

“Gotta love Beacon Hills,” Stiles says, tipping his cardboard cup towards the sun. “Apocalyptic on a lazy Tuesday.”

Lydia laughs, and Stiles gives her a shy sort of smile, sideways. Scoots over on the grass, to give her room to sit.

“How are you?” Lydia says, and really means it.

Stiles smiles. “I'm good,” he says, and looks up at her. “It's-- weird being back, though. I mean! good, to see everyone, obviously, but, uh--”

“Yeah,” Lydia says, sparing him the excuse. “It's weird for me, too.”

There's a pause. Lydia blows over the rim of her coffee cup, and it makes a noise like wind, howling in miniature.

“I'm sorry,” she says. “About last summer, Stiles. That wasn't. Fair.”

She's thought about this a lot, what she will say to him, but caught off guard today, she ends up with  _ that _ . With the small change of platitudes.

Stiles says, startling her, “ _ you’re _ sorry? I've been kicking myself all year!”

Lydia blinks. “For  _ what _ ?”

“Uh!” Stiles turns, halfway, his arms coming out to gesture.  _ Akimbo _ , Lydia thinks.

It really _is_ good, to see him again.

“I'm pretty sure ‘freaking out and walking away’ isn't in the ‘how to take your friend coming out’ handbook.”

Lydia’s throat aches. “There’s a handbook?” She says.

Stiles looks at her. “There are many, many handbooks.” 

He shrugs, shoulders pointy as ever. Lydia remembers having her hands on them, as they kissed, and thinks,  _ God, how? _

“So,” Stiles says, after a moment. “I'm sorry.”

Lydia laughs. Of course she does. Shakes her head. “You were a dumb kid,” She says, with the sort of total, its-behind-me confidence that only someone who’s 'not a kid' by scant technicality can muster. “I don't blame you.”

“We both were.” Stiles shoves his hand back through his hair, offers up a nervous little smile. “Well, maybe not  _ dumb _ , but definitely kids.”

Lydia nods. Sits, belatedly, the grass crunchy-brown. She plants her coffee cup in the dirt, twists it in circles until the stalks, tangled up in the motion, tear up, shallow roots bursting the topsoil.

Lydia puts her hands on her knees, instead.

“I  _ am _ sorry,” she says. “Stiles--”

“You don't have to be sorry about being--”

“Not for being gay,” Lydia says, though the word’s still a bit strange in her mouth, all corners. “But I-- hurt you, I think. And I wish I hadn't. So I’m sorry, for that.”

Stiles looks down at his feet. Fixes the laces on one of his shoes, where it's coming unraveled. “Well,” he says. “I got over it.”

Lydia swallows, hard. Looks sideways at him.

“What!” Stiles says. “You’re  _ a catch,  _ Lydia, but it is  _ possible _ for someone to get over you.”

It's a pale attempt at a joke-- Lydia thinks she can hear a hint of hurt at the corners, the sour of it curling up Stiles’s voice, but she laughs, anyway.

“In that case,” she says. “I'll forgive you, for the coming-out thing,  if you forgive me for the rest?” 

Stiles laughs. Looks up at her, and unfolds a narrow hand, to shake. Bits of dried grass stick to his palm. “Deal,” he says, and Lydia shakes on it, schooling her smile into a joking, an over-solemn frown.

* * *

And Lydia says, as they catch up- a little unfair, maybe, a little selfish- “I  _ do _ love you, you know.”

And this Stiles, older and unfamiliar but  _ Stiles _ , still, says, “I-- know, Lydia.” 

* * *

He does not say I love you back.

Lydia figures she maybe deserves that.

* * *

“Scott’s throwing a party on Friday,” he says, before they part ways. “I'm sure he’d want you there, if you're free.”

“I'm free,” Lydia says. Wants to say it immediately, emphatically, but she has not become totally uncool. 

“Great!” Stiles nods, bobblehead, shoves his hands into his pockets. “Cool! I'll see you there.”

He, by contrast, has not  _ become _ cool, in the slightest.

It’s nice. Not everything has to change. 

* * *

 

Stiles ends up giving Lydia a ride to the party-- Malia has shown up early, to talk with Scott (“werewolf business”).

When Lydia walks in, Malia’s whole body turns for her. Like that myth about sunflowers, bending towards the light. Stiles, behind Lydia, makes a noise, comprehending, in the back of his throat.

Lydia half expects to turn around and see him removing tacks from a cork board, like,  _ mystery solved _ .

* * *

Liam has his third terrible haircut in three years, buzzed short like Stiles had, in freshman year, and his ears stick way out from his head, a little goofy.

It's good to see him, again.

It's good to see everyone, again, Hayden and Lucas and Mason, Liam awkwardly at their lead.

But--

But Scott, Stiles, and Malia, especially. Scott, who is debating with Liam in low words about how long you have to let a steak rest, before you grill it-- or are you supposed to let it rest  _ after _ cooking it? And then Scott turns, and sees her and Stiles in the doorway, and he  _ beams _ . It's catching, Scott’s smile is, his straight teeth a little big for his crooked mouth, and he lopes across the living room to greet them. Sweeps Lydia up in a hug, and he says, “Lydia!” All this uncomplicated delight.

And for all that Lydia’s life is split in two, now; her friends in Massachusetts, her classes, the start of her adulthood there laid out on the other side of the country--

And here. And Beacon Hills, and the pack around her, Scott smelling like too-much deodorant and greeting her, eagerly, at the door.

Anyway. The point is. Something closes up in her chest. Some festering wound, an infection she hadn't been aware of, knits itself shut.

“It's good to see you, Scott,” Lydia says, and means it right down to her stupid, supernatural bones.

Scott grins. Hasn't stopped grinning, maybe.

Then Liam hollers from the kitchen, “SCOTT, YOUR OVEN IS SMOKING,” and Scott gives Lydia sort of a sheepish look, claps Stiles on the shoulder, and trots off to put out a fire.

“The more things change…” Stiles says, and Lydia laughs.

“Yeah.”

She thinks, in the constants that teenagers do, that this will  _ always  _ be here for her. That whatever else may happen, it's good to know she will always be able to come back to this.

* * *

“So,” Stiles says, as they make up the table for dinner-- just the two of them, roped into helping like everyone always sort of is, and never really minds, where the pack is concerned. “You and Malia, you're still--”

Lydia fights a smile off her face. “Yeah,” she says. Swaps a knife and fork Stiles had set out on the wrong sides of a plate. “Yes, we’re-- ‘still’.”

Stiles laughs. “What does that make? A year?”

Lydia blinks. “I guess so,” she says. “Almost, anyway. Jesus.”

Stiles laughs, again. Sobers. Lydia watches him make little  _ d _ s with his hands, trying to sort out which side of a plate the glass goes on. They work in silence, for a while.

“She must really like you,” he says, eventually. “Malia, I mean. She usually doesn't-- I haven't known her to stay still like that. Before, I mean.”

“Well,” Lydia says. “I really like her, so. I hope so.”

Stiles makes a sound, in the back of his throat. “I’m-” he says. “That's-- I'm happy for you.”

Lydia straightens up, looks at him. “You don't have to--”

“No,” Stiles straightens, too-- or, as much as he ever does, with his semi-permanent slouch. Sounds almost surprised when he says, “I am. Kinda weird you’re both my exes, though. I mean--”

“Oh,” Lydia says. “Don't worry, we finished talking about you behind your back a few months ago.”

Stiles makes an affronted noise, and Lydia laughs. 

“ _ In-depth _ gossip,” she promises, “every last detail--” 

And then Stiles throws a napkin at her, and Lydia bats it back.

It's good.

She missed him. Missed being  _ normal _ with him, no secrets or tension, it is just them laid bare, here in Scott’s illused dining room. There's a knot of something in her throat-- some melancholy, maybe, and awkward silence settles, occasionally, between them, like dust in an old room. But she looks up and sees him there, working through it. And so she is, too. 

* * *

The steak, by some miracle, actually ends up pretty good.

“Guess too many cooks don't spoil a  _ steak _ ,” Stiles says. Hayden brought some slightly soggy potatoes, leftovers from work. Mason brought vegetables to grill-- “werewolves might be able to get scurvy, we don't know!”

They crowd in, together, around the McCall's dusty dining table, and eat, and the chatter rises up like a tide, fills the little room straight to the brim.

Liam regales them with tales of monster hunts, since Scott’s been away.

“Still think we should killed that harpy,” Malia says, and Hayden, playing along, goes,

“Oh, sure,  _ maimed _ at least,” and Malia nods, mouth stuffed full, pointing her fork emphatically in Hayden’s direction.

“I know I'm not in charge anymore,” Scott says, like  _ that’s _ true. “But I’d like my vote cast as anti-maiming?”

“Oh, sure.” Stiles rolls his eyes. “Party pooper.”

By dessert, they have all eaten too much, and Lydia’s stomach hurts, she realizes, from  _ laughter _ .

This warmth, this contentment, has snuck up on her. And now, crammed elbow-to-elbow with her friends- her family, her  _ pack, _  bonded with blood and common interest and wolfbite- now she could almost  _ cry  _  with it. How happy she is.

How far they have come.

* * *

 

Lydia declines an ice cream but steals a spoonful of Malia’s. 

Liam gives her a look like she’s texting in a movie theatre, 3rd-degree hairy eyeball.

“Last time I stole a fry from you,” he says, in Malia’s direction, “you almost bit my hand off.”

Malia shrugs. “She's prettier than you,” she says, and then her spine flattens out. “I mean-” 

But it's-- Lydia puts a hand on her arm. “Better kisser, too,” she says. Malia grins at her, surprise in it. Delight. There is still a knot of nerves, in Lydia’s throat.

“ _ Hey _ !” Liam says, and then processes. “Wait-”

And Malia kisses her, there at the table, their mouths sticky with ice cream. Lydia’s heart hammers. It is strange, how frightening it is, for all that she would trust every person here with her life.

“Oh thank God,” Stiles says. “Keeping that secret was  _ killing _ me.”

Scott says, “I'm happy for you two,” and Hayden says,

“Of course  _ you _ knew, always sticking your nose in stuff-”

And Mason gives Lydia a smile, across the table, a nod. 

Lydia’s nerves do not go away. But they are joined by warmth, bubbling up irrepressible in her chest. Malia tangles their hand together, and Lydia cannot stop a smile, watching their friends bicker and chatter, falling immediately back into their comfortable rhythm.

And whatever it is- supernatural pack-bonding or dumb, human friendship- it doesn't matter. Lydia stops picking at it, the threads of her affection, and she holds Malia’s hand, and she allows herself that. The simple triumph of love.

* * *

 

She falls deeply asleep on Scott’s living room couch, crammed halfway on top of Malia. Wakes up with a crick in her back. Feels better rested than she has since she left Massachusetts.

* * *

The first full moon of that summer sort of sneaks up on her. June disappears, the way that June does. Lydia looks up and suddenly it’s the end of the month, and the moon hangs low and fat in the sky, like ripe fruit. 

Almost without realizing, Lydia leads Malia on another chase. She drives through the streets of her childhood, made strange, made a little unfamiliar. It is startling, that. How easy things are to forget. 

How quick it is. The forgetting. 

* * *

They end up, as they have before, high in the foothills, the low slopes that hunch up against the base of the mountains.

The day dawns, slowly. Smoke and the hills block the sun out until, suddenly, the whole sky is lit up red and orange, as if the wildfires have leapt somehow to the clouds. They watch it sitting back against the car, the world sloping away in front of them, the whole world.

“Not a bad view,” Lydia says, and Malia, half dressed where she is draped across Lydia’s lap, says, 

“No kidding.”

The car is a hot, solid weight behind them. They watch the sun rise. Smoke and light, mostly, and then rays break through the vault of the clouds like a kid’s drawing, these thick beams that draw out shadows across the whole of the hillside, light up Malia’s face soft and golden.

“You’re beautiful,” Lydia says, but that isn't the point, so she tries again. “I,” she says. Malia’s eyes are huge, liquid, and she seems to hold her breath.

“I’m really glad,” Lydia ends up with. “That we’re-- together.”

Malia snorts. The sun is catching in each of her eyelashes, on the lines of her collarbones, shadows in the hollows of her ribs. Lydia traces a line down her side, and Malia shivers.

“You can just say it,” Malia says, flat and harsh as anything she ever says, as the drought-packed ground beneath them. “I'm not going anywhere.”

Lydia stills her hand. Presses it palm-flat to Malia’s ribs, warm as earth and moving, slowly, with her breath.

“I love you,” Lydia says. “You know that.”

She half expects Malia to laugh. But she only smiles, some, without teeth, and the sun-freckles on her cheeks wrinkle up.

Lydia feels scooped out, hollow. Someone has removed her guts and replaced them all with light, with honey, and here she is, still ticking.

“I know,” Malia says. “I do, too. Love you.”

Lydia swallows this enormous rock in her throat, bends her head low over Malia, and Malia reaches up a hand, brushes hair out of Lydia’s eyes.

It is a moment perhaps too big for words. For Lydia’s words, anyway, the cut-and-dry of them, her if/then statements. She does not know quite what to make of it.

So they sit there, the two of them, in silence. Take deep lungfuls of that summer-in-the-Pacific-Northwest smell, that is fresh and green but mostly cannot be described except by its component parts. Mulch and Cedar. Water. Smoke. Things growing and decomposing. Lydia takes a breath and holds it. Misses home, a little, for all that she is there. For all the horrors Beacon Hills visited upon them.

Then Malia squirms upright, this tangle of indignity and sharp elbows, and she kisses Lydia, chaste, at her temple.

Lydia turns, and the next kiss lands just left of her mouth.

“You missed,” she says.

“Shut up,” Malia tells her, something for once soft, in her voice. “Just enjoy the fucking moment.”

Lydia takes a deep breath. The day rises, overtop them.

She enjoys the fucking moment.

* * *

 

They get hungry, eventually, and Malia pulls on a shirt. Climbs into the passenger seat.

Lydia, makeup smudgy from a long night, pine-needles clinging to the back of her sweater, opens the drivers’ side. Puts her key in the ignition.

_ Two monsters get into a car _ , she thinks, some joke in there, somewhere, under the truth of it.  _ Two women get into a car. _

The engine rumbles to life, and Lydia checks her mirrors. Looks, deliberately, into the footwell, and finds her foot on the gas.

She rolls down the windows. Presses down on the throttle. The car lurches forward.

They drive.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> huh, its a shame we didnt get to chapter 10. o well. thanks for reading <3

**Author's Note:**

> Me: “Eye should listen to this Malcom Gladwell Podcaste about car crashes! Won't that be Fun?”  
> My horrible brain: “Teen wolf fanfiction. twenty five thousand words.”
> 
> ANYWAY! this is all written but not all edited, so it should be going up fairly regularly. concrit welcome. I'm at lordsnake.tumblr.com.
> 
> who let me write this.


End file.
